Auditory-aural and visual-gestural languages are perceived through difference sensory mechanisms, yet both are languages and in both the process of interpretation is similar. Conveying meaning across languages means going beyond the form; it also means incorporating the affect of a source language utterance in the target language in effective and culturally appropriate ways.

Janice Humphrey details the use of graduation portfolios, a valuable assessment tool used by the faculty to determine a student's level of competency. These imaginative techniques in Innovative Practices promise gains in sign language interpreting that will benefit teachers, students, and clients alike.

Depiction, a phenomenon similar to iconicity, involves representing what something “looks like or is like” (Streeck 2008:289). Because depiction is used more heavily in sign languages than spoken languages (Dudis 2007), people interpreting or translating spoken/written texts into signed languages struggle to use depiction naturally (Thumann 2011). This thesis analyzes constructed action (CA) and constructed dialogue (CD), two types of depiction in which the signer’s hands represent those of a discourse participant. Using Tannen (1989) & Metzger’s (1995) framework of non-directly-quoted CACD and Quinto-Pozos & Mehta’s (2010) degrees of CA, I examine differences between narratives originally composed in ASL and narrative segments from Genesis and Exodus that have been translated into ASL, all of which were signed by Deaf users of ASL. This analysis indicates that translated texts are slower and use less nondirectly-quoted CD than non-translated texts. Measuring depiction can improve the naturalness of these and other translations.

Link to videos: "The Impact Of Translation On Constructed Action and Constructed Dialog" by Beth Gray (und.edu)