Cohesion in English to ASL simultaneous interpreting

Abstract

A study was done with 12 American Sign Language (ASL) -English interpreters to examine their use of cohesive devices while working simultaneously from Englishinto ASL. Concern has been raised in the literature on spoken and sign language interpreters that practitioners create target textsthat lack cohesion (La Bue, 1998; Langer, 2007; Sunnari, 1995). Halliday and Hasan's(1976) theoretical model of cohesion was used as a framework for this study. Oneaspectof cohesion wasaddressed, conjunctive devices. The participantsincluded seven novice interpreters, who had seven or fewer years of practice with ASL and who were recent graduates of an interpretation program. In addition, five expertstook part who had more than two decades of experience as interpreters and who were all nationally certified. ThreeDeaf interpreter educators rated each interpreter's fluency in ASL, and found the experts created morefluent texts than the novices(**p = 0.006). To understand why the Deaf raters found the experts more fluent, a number of basic language featuresin the interpreters' ASL target textswere compared but no significant difference was found in the number of signs created(p = 0.57), the number of unique signs (p= .074),signs per minute (p=0.57), the use of third person reference produced manually (p=0.46)or in the amount of information the interpreters omitted while interpreting (p=0.361). There was a significant difference in the interpreters' use of conjunctive devices(**p=0.007), wherethe experts produced more of them.