Interpretation and the explicitation process

Abstract

Historically, most research has focused on the ability of sign language interpreters towork from English as a source text into American Sign Language (ASL) as a target text.Little has been done on their ability to work from ASL into spoken English. To addressthat gap, a pilot study was done to examine the English target texts of 22 interpreterswho were asked to simultaneously interpret 4 short ASL monologues. The focus of thispilotwas on the incorporation of the articles, “a/an” and “the” and the coordinating conjunctions,“for,” “and,” “nor,” “but,” “or,” “yet,” and “so” in the participants’ English targettexts. The findings indicate that the interpreters did include these even when anequivalent structure was not produced as a manual, lexical item by the native signers intheir ASL stories. Their adaptations served to potentially strengthen the English targettexts by possibly reducing the cognitive load needed to comprehend the utterances byan English-speaking audience, and indicate that decisionswere made by the interpretersto include these structures.