I’m posting this for anyone who is curious to watch an English-ASL interpreter at work on stage with a speaker. Dr. Johanna Blackley and the Honors Forum coordinator at Mesa Community College were kind enough to let me share this video my interpreting partner took of me with my phone. I asked my team to record it so I could use it for self-assessment in an interpreting studies class I was taking in graduate school. I’m sharing it because I think it’s important for interpreters to see real examples of other interpreters’ work — the hits and misses in this imperfect thing we call interpretation. Most of this sample is dialogue during the Q & A portion at the end of Johanna’s lecture.
Oh, and one more thing — there was no Deaf consumer in the audience that I knew of. We were providing access for anyone who chose to show up, and there might have been someone there I was unaware of, but I had to interpret as if someone were relying on me for access to the event. My professor in the interpreting studies course I mentioned above advised us always to imagine a specific consumer, so I was imagining a client who was a fashion design student who knew something about the topic and was comfortable with both ASL and English. A more authentic interpreting sample would show an interpreter directing the target text at specific consumers. Nevertheless, I hope you can learn something about English-to-ASL interpreting from watching this sample.
P.S. I apologize that this isn’t closed-captioned. It would take several hours that I don’t have these days to transcribe the English dialogue and synchronize it with the speech. I hope you understand.
