Advances in Teaching Sign Language Interpreters

Curriculum Revision in the Twenty-First Century: Northeastern’s Experience

D E N N I S C O K E L Y Curriculum Revision in the Twenty-First Century Northeastern’s Experience In the spring of 2001, Northeastern University’s board of trustees approved a faculty resolution that the university convert from a quarter system to a semester system. Instead of four 11- or 12-week quarters per academic year, there would be two 15-week semesters and two intensive, 71 ⁄2-week summer sessions. Most courses would be four credits, and students would normally carry sixteen credits per full semester. The board determined that the conversion would take place in the fall of 2003. This conversion afforded programs the opportunity to revise their curricula in whole or in part. The American Sign Language Program, already in the process of examining its language curriculum, decided to use this opportunity to revise its interpreting curriculum. The principals involved in the revision of the interpreting curriculum were Cathy Cogen, Robert Lee, and myself. We decided to base our revision on two primary factors, the theoretical and philosophical influences that had shaped our current curriculum and the extent to which our current curriculum prepared graduates for the types of interpreting situations into which they would be placed. Theoretical and Philosophical Influences In 1983 the biennial Conference of Interpreter Trainers (CIT) in Monterey, California, invited educators from college and university 1 spoken-language-interpretation programs to share their experiences and perspectives on curriculum sequencing and assessment. This CIT, as well as presentations by spoken-language-interpreter educators at subsequent CIT and Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) conventions (see McIntire 1984, 1987), has had significant impact on the design and implementation of sign language interpreter training and education programs in the United States. It is ironic that in 1965 the first organization of sign language interpreting , the National Registry of Professional Interpreters and Translators for the Deaf, when searching for a new name, rejected suggestions from spoken-language interpreters that the name reflect the languages being worked with and instead changed the organizational name to RID. Among the significant new foci for signlanguage -interpreter curricula after 1983 was the recognition of the usefulness and importance of translation and consecutive interpretation in enabling students to isolate and hone certain skill sets before they encountered the time pressures imposed by simultaneous interpretation. This recognition has led to a quite commonly accepted sequence of skill-set development (translation → consecutive interpretation → simultaneous interpretation) that in many programs takes the form of separate courses. The organizing principle underpinning this skill-set sequence is the gradual introduction of the pressures of real-time interpreting. In translation courses the production of the translation is fully separated in time (time shifted) from the production of the original. In interactions in which consecutive interpretation is used, the production of the interpretation is partially time shifted, and in simultaneous interpretation the production of the interpretation is in real time. Of course, because simultaneous interpretation is never temporally synchronous, there is a sense in which simultaneous interpretation is time shifted, at least at a micro, or phrasal or sentential, level. At a macro level, however, simultaneous interpreters create the illusion of temporal synchrony by striving not to alter the initial and terminal boundaries of interactions. The focus on temporal synchrony was, in fact, at the core of the sequence of courses followed in Northeastern’s interpreting 2 Dennis Cokely curriculum before the year 2003. Specifically, our primary skill-development courses were American Sign Language (ASL) 1505, Translation; ASL 1506, Consecutive Interpretation; and ASL 1507 and 1508, Simultaneous Interpretation. However, twenty years and a new millennium after the 1983 CIT conference, emboldened by the opportunity to revise our interpreting curriculum, we determined that it was time to question whether the general organizing principles and sequencing of skill sets that resulted from the 1983 conference and that were widely accepted in sign-languageinterpreting training and education programs remained meaningful for our curriculum and for the field. Another characteristic of the curricula that grew out of the 1983 conference, perhaps influenced subtly by the experience of spokenlanguage interpreters, was a focus on monologue interpreting. Given that the ultimate goal of those spoken-language programs represented at CIT and RID conferences was—and remains—to produce graduates able to interpret simultaneously at international conferences , the focus of their curricula would logically be monologues. The extensive (indeed, almost exclusive) use of...