You Know That English Is Interesting Too, Right?

American Sign Language interpreters spend 50 percent of their working day using or understanding ASL, and the other 50 percent using or understanding spoken English. However, do interpreters spend 50 percent of their training investigating the English language?  How about 40 percent. 30? 20? In fact, interpreters think about the English language quite infrequently, relying on the confidence that they are fluent. But there is more to mastering a language than fluency, isn’t there? Interpreters know the history of ASL, its varieties across time and space, how it defines a culture, and how oppression has influenced the language and its users. We are better interpreters because we respect ASL and we strive to be experts in all its facets. Well what about… that other language? Wouldn’t knowing the story of English — its usage and users, its history and cultural relevance — also make us better interpreters? Should we be English experts as well? This workshop tackles the previously unanswered — and unasked — questions.

Educational Objectives :

• Classify English into four linguistic eras
• Name six phenomena through which language changes
• Compare inflected and uninfected languages
• Differentiate among accents, dialects, and languages
• Examine English and ASL idioms
• Recognize four key English language challenges for interpreters
• Identify 17 differences between English and ASL
• Apply an understanding of the history of English to daily interpreting practices

Presented by Alek Lev, NIC-Master, CI, CT

Voiced/Captioned