The Preservation of Sign Language by George Veditz

Here is one of the videos from Gallaudet University's Video Library

Browse the Gallaudet Video Catalog of various other videos that you can stream and even embed in your course Bb sites. If you are using a Mac you can download Flip4Mac to play videos made for Windows Media Player.

Carol Patrie's Effective Interpreting Series: A Review

Interpreter’s Resource Shelf (appeared in RID VIEWS March, 2008, reprinted with permission)
Kathy MacMillan, NIC, M.L.S.

• English Skills Development, Study Set on DVD by Carol J. Patrie. DawnSignPress, 2000. ISBN 1-58121-172-4. $64.95.
• Cognitive Processing Skills in English, Study Set on DVD by Carol J. Patrie. DawnSignPress, 2000. ISBN 1-58121-166-X. $64.95.
  Translating from English, Study Set on DVD by Carol J. Patrie. DawnSignPress, 2001. ISBN 1-58121-100-7. $64.95.
• Consecutive Interpreting from English, Study Set on DVD by Carol J. Patrie. DawnSignPress, 2004. ISBN 1-58121-166-X. $64.95.
• Simultaneous Interpreting from English, Study Set on DVD by Carol J. Patrie. DawnSignPress, 2005. ISBN 1-58121-106-6. $64.95.

These 5 books in Patrie’s “Effective Interpreting Series” lay out the basic skills needed to interpret from English to American Sign Language in a logical, step-by-step fashion. Each volume is also available in a Teacher’s Set that includes specific suggestions for using the materials in the classroom, but the Study Sets listed here are ideal for students or working interpreters doing independent study. Each book also includes a DVD containing all of the source material needed to complete the exercises. English Skills Development and Cognitive Processing Skills in English focus on those intralingual skills that are so necessary to develop before working between two languages: understanding the relationship between visual form and meaning, lexical substitution, paraphrasing at the proposition and discourse levels, identifying the main idea, summarizing, comprehension, memory, repetition, pattern inference, and multitasking. The last three volumes work between languages, beginning with analyzing a finished product in the source language in Translating from English. This book lays out the process of translation and allows readers to focus on the necessary skills one at a time. Readers can then move on to Consecutive Interpreting from English, which builds on the translation skills already learned and adds effective note-taking, listening, and monitoring and correction skills. The final volume is Simultaneous Interpreting from English, which builds on the previous volumes and addresses issues of processing time, comprehension, and monitoring. In each volume, chapters give a succinct overview of the topic, followed by three to six practice activities. In a field that too often seems like a magical conflation of elements to newcomers, novices and working interpreters alike can benefit from Patrie’s step-by-step skill-building approach.

This column appears monthly in VIEWS. Please direct questions, comments, or suggestions for resources to highlight in future issues to Kathy MacMillan at info@kathymacmillan.com.