Reading Between the Signs: Intercultural Communication for Sign Language Interpreters

✍ Scribed by Anna Mindess

• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Boston
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 313
• Edition: 2nd Edition
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Listen up ITP trainers! "Reading Between the Signs" is a true gem and should be required reading for all students in Interpreter Training Programs nationwide.

Mindess and her publisher's copy editors possess the requisite skills to render a typographically error-free book with pleasing margins and fonts, unlike Alcorn and Humphrey's "So You Want to Be an Interpreter," a required text of many ITPs.

Unlike Alcorn and Humphrey, who dutifully introduce and briefly discuss cross-cultural differences and how they influence sign language interpreting, Mindess thoughtfully and thoroughly takes the reader on an extended journey with deep, eye-opening analysis and a plethora of real-world examples that interpreters encounter every day. It's easy to understand the content with so many supporting examples of it throughout the text.

Like an engaging movie, play, or book that requires the moviegoer, theatergoer, or reader to use his/her critical thinking skills and comparisons to one's own experiences to what s/he experiences in that particular media, Mindess' book goes by quickly, because the content is so well-developed and on-point.

I found this book quite by accident. It was on a reading list of an online course I took to prepare for the NIC Knowledge Exam. I found it to be extraordinarily helpful in filling in the gaps I had regarding cross-cultural communication between the hearing and Deaf communities. It answered a lot of questions I had and I felt much better having read it before taking the NIC Knowledge Exam (which I successfully passed).

A must-have on your professional bookshelf!

✦ Table of Contents

Reading Between the Signs......Page 4
Contents......Page 8
Foreword......Page 10
Preface......Page 12
Acknowledgments......Page 16
PART ONE Background......Page 18
1 Introduction......Page 20
2 The Study of Culture......Page 34
3 Selected Topics in Intercultural Communication......Page 56
4 Do Americans Really Have a Culture?......Page 82
5 American Deaf Culture......Page 93
6 Multicultural Deaf Culture......Page 137
7 Culture, Change, and Technology......Page 160
PART TWO Practical Applications......Page 172
8 The Impact of Cultural Differences on Interpreting Situations......Page 174
9 Multicultural Interpreting Challenges......Page 194
10 The Interpreter’s Role and Responsibilities......Page 206
11 Techniques for Cultural Adjustments......Page 235
12 Interpretingin a Virtual World......Page 256
13 Cultural Sensitivity Shouldn’t End at Five O’Clock......Page 270
Afterword......Page 292
Bibliography......Page 295
About the Authorand Contributors......Page 304
Index......Page 306