General Interpreting Skill Development
Toolkit for Legal Interpreters
General Interpreting Skill Development
The guides presented below are designed to improve and/or enhance general skills of sign language interpreters. Sometimes an interpreter can experience gaps in some of their foundation skills in ASL or English which impacts their ability to focus on the mastery of the more complex skills needed to interpret in legal settings.
Each guide identifies specific activities and resource materials that can be used in practicing the skill. Links to associated resources and/or references are provided.
Activities:
- ASL Comprehension: This guide presents strategies to improve comprehension of an ASL message.
- Culturally Bound Concepts: This guide suggests way to improve the recognition and interpretation of culturally bound concepts.
- Fingerspelling & Numbers: This guide provides activities to improve fingerspelling and numbers within ASL narratives.
- Memory Skills: This guide provides activities to improve retention of a narrative.
- Processing Skills: This guide lists activities to improve mental operations associated with processing.
- Pronouns & Prolocatives: This guide presents activities to improve recognition of referents in narratives.
- Semantic Awareness: This guide explores activities to build ASL and English vocabulary.
- Sentence Boundaries: This guide provides activities to recognize and improve sentence boundaries in narratives.
- Spatial Structuring – Classifier Use: This guide presents exercises to improve spatial structuring through classifer use in ASL and English narratives.
- Spatial Structuring – Referencing: This guide lists deictic markers and provides exercised to improve spatial structuring through the use of referencing.
- Spatial Structuring – Verb Agreement and Distribution: This guide explores spatial mapping of verbs and offers activities to improve verb agreement and distribution.
- Topic Shifts: This guide offers structured exercises to improve recognition of topic shifts in ASL and English narratives.
- Text Analysis of Non-Legal Text: This guide presents a multi-step approach to analyze non-legal texts in either ASL or English.
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