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Deaf Interpreter

Deaf individuals bring a unique and indispensable set of skills and aptitudes to the interpreting task. A Deaf person who has grown up in the Deaf world, exposed from an early age to American Sign Langauge (ASL), its linguistic variations and its community, is instilled with an ability to understand and express ideas visually that is rare in non-Deaf (hearing) individuals.

Deaf interpreters may be called upon to serve as an intermediary between a hearing interpreter and a deaf client who may not know conventional American Sign Language (ASL) due to educational deprivation, foreign language background, language deprivation, or physical or mental disability; or to mediate between a Deaf monolingual ASL-user and a hearing interpreter who, by design or by default, delivers the source language message in English-based signing. Deaf interpreters may also be employed to interpret for deaf-blind individuals, and to translate written English texts into ASL. Any of these roles demands specialized knowledge and skills.

From 1993-2000, the Interpreter Education Project sponsored two three-year certificate programs designed to prepare Deaf individuals as interpreters. A number of participants completed the programs, many of whom are working as interpreters today. This type of training opportunity is rare and currently existing interpreter education programs are not equipped to prepare Deaf interpreters. For that reason, during the current five-year grant cycle, our goal is to create a set of guidelines that will support existing interpreter education programs in expanding their student bodies to include prospective Deaf interpreters.

Our approach to this objective has built on past accomplishments and is collaborative with our sister projects in Regions II and III. The perspectives of educators, students, and administrators who have been involved in both our grant supported certificate programs and the Northeastern University's Part-Tme College certificate and degree programs will inform a set of guidelines that will be made available by the end of the grant cycle. The guidelines will include a description of the distinct functions of the deaf interpreter and recommendations to programs concerning course content, materials, staffing, and recruitment. Several steps have been undertaken to date:

1. a group of certified Deaf interpreters participated in a two-part seminar focused on developing a task analysis with the guidance of Dennis Cokely during 2003 (year 3);
2. the group shared its findings in a session at the 2003 New England Regional Mentorship Conference;
3. the 2004 annual meeting of program directors took up the topic of training Deaf interpreters; and
4. the current and future demand for Certified Deaf Interpreters was examined at the annual region-wide advisory board meeting on March 12, 2004.

Next steps will include gathering videotaped samples of CDIs performing their job tasks, a review of the curriculum we developed between 1990-95 for its applicability in traditional college-level programs, and planning for production of videotaped material useful in training CDIs. We continue to be in communication with Region II and III projects.