Marina McIntire once said “Interpreting is Impossible… So Get Better”. This workshop provides discrete training tools to help both students and working professionals improve their overall abilities to interpret. Discussion topics include
Perception of Numbers (the Five-Minute Workshop)
or "Open your eyes in just 300 seconds"
- Sixes (bottom curves) and Nines (straight sides)
- Sevens (short/long straight +2) and Eights (equal curves +3)
Production & Perception of Fingerspelling
- Finding your personally correct hand configurations [tension, release & reset]
- Fingerspelling grid (pairs of letters) [AA, AB, AC ...XZ, YZ, ZZ]
- Fingerspelling round-robin [pair up, alternately produce & perceive two lists of words]
English Grammar and Production
Sentence structure / processing time
Articulation / volume / speed
- Listen to the radio and repeat back, verbatim and with equal inflection, what people are saying. (this and the next one work well when driving alone between assignments)
- After doing the repetition task for at least one minute STOP, turn down the radio and prepare to summarize what you just said... first plan it, then confidently speak it out loud as though you were explaining it to a person who had not heard any of the original text.
- Read a paragraph in English. Restate the same paragraph in your own terms in spoken English. Restate the same concepts once again in ASL.
- Listen to or read a paragraph of English text. Restate the concepts in a different text type
- Narrative (telling / informing) - tell me a story
- Description (reporting / explaining) - give me definitions and details
- Argumentation (analysis / urging / discussion) - convince me of the pros or cons
Bilingual Processing of Information (Apply these to your work)
- language to image to language (using drawings in notes)
- hop skip and jump (consecutive processing within simultaneous interpreting)
- Colonomos Training = Concentrate / Represent (visualize) / Plan (rehearse)
- visual competition (conscious insertion of gaps / sharing visual space)
Effective Cultural Adjustments between source and target texts (thought pieces to guide future work)
- Name signs (Sandra McLennon)
- Educational Choices (institute / oral / mainstream) (Mal Grosinger)
- Deaf Artifacts (bed vibrators / flashing lights / TTYs / Videophones)
