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REVIEWS IN BRIEF Cheryl Hoffman and Charles Thomas, Publisher have issued a third edition of their Comprehensive Reference Manualfor Signers and Interpreters.The price has gone up from $21.75 to $24.00 and the cover copy promises "Updated sign descriptions and almost 1,000 additional entries. . ."We note, however, that signs are still described as in the edition briefly reviewed in our Winter 1985 issue (SLS 49:374), and quote from that review a comment/translation on a typical entry: ABOVE = cir rpdtsl hor abv Ipdtsr OR MORE THAN Translation: 'Circle right [hand], palm down, tips left, horizontally above left [hand], palm down, tips right: or else make use of another sign, glossed here as MORE-THAN' (to be found on p. 117). Note that "OR" is entries like this means, 'use the following sign'. It is not part of the gloss although also printed in caps -- but would an accomplished interpreter need to be told how to sign ABOVE? The new edition also uses the same logic in putting down one English word as exactly equal to another: if the manual's user knows how to sign the word to the right of the equal sign, the implication is that the same sign will translates the word on the left. Thus, on page 153, the entry reads: PRIVILEGE = HONOR w rP OR ALLOW W PS OR RIGHT (def #3) OR PRIVATE To sign the meaning privilege, one must make the sign for: HONOR w rP [with the right hand fingerspelling 'P']. OR [else for] ALLOW w Ps [the 2-hand sign glossed 'permit]. OR [else for] RIGHT (def #3) [to be found on page 167], OR [else for] PRIVATE [the third entry above PRIVILEGE, a sign on the chin and a sign on the left arm are given as glosses]. o 1989. Linstok Press, Inc. See note inside front cover ISSN 0302-1475 81 SLS 62 But even these notes are unavoidably ambiguous. The convention now widely used is that a word in upper case letters represents a sign of ASL; thus, there is either a sign ALLOW known to the user of the book, or one chooses another sign, perhaps LET, if one knows a sign called 'let' to stand for the English word allow. Quite clearly, neither this nor the earlier edition treat ASL as a language. Instead the compiler has revived the exploded ideas of Silverman, Myklebust, and other "experts" of the 1950s: namely, that signs are used vaguely and loosely, more or less to suggest what spoken words denote clearly. The title's claim that this is a handbook for interpreters cannot be supported. Interpreters know, or they are not interpreters, that to interpret requires recasting the meaning of phrases in one language into phrases of another language. They know that glossing word-by-word does not interpret; instead it destroys meaning. By listing English words in upper case letters, by using the equal sign in every entry, and by using words in caps in the "definition" part of entries, this manual implies that a word-for-word procedure is "comprehensive" and insists that one English word is the same as another or as several others. By its focus on words and its graphic assurance that one sign may be used for translating the meaning of any of a number of words, the manual perpetuates the paternalistically blind claim that while English is a language rich in synonyms and bursting with vocabulary growth, signs available to an interpreter and to deaf clients are very few. The cover states "This dictionary of sign language now contains more than 7,000 entries -- both vocabulary and idioms -- with cross referencing and sign descriptions where appropriate." But only a few entries per page include an abbreviated description of a sign (see ABOVE). The vast majority of entries simply set the sign for one word equal to the sign for another. This revision was published in May of 1988 and so must have been in production before the Revolution of the Deaf in March; a further edition will now hardly be needed. WCS ...

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