This new collection examines several facets of signed language interpreting. Claudia Angelelli’s study confirms that conference, courtroom, and medical interpretation can no longer be seen as a two-party conversation with an “invisible” interpreter, but as a three-party conversation in which the interpreter plays an active role. Laura M. Sanheim defines different turn-taking elements in a medical setting as two overlapping conversations, one between the patient and the interpreter and the other between the interpreter and the medical professional. In her analysis of discourse at a Deaf revival service, Mary Ann Richey demonstrates how Deaf presenters and audiences interact even in formal settings, creating special challenges for interpreters. Jemina Napier shares her findings on the nature and occurrence of omissions by interpreters in Australian Sign Language and English exchanges. Elizabeth Winston and Christine Monikowski describe different strategies used by interpreters to indicate topic shifts when interpreting into American Sign Language and when transliterating. The study concludes with Bruce Sofinski’s analysis of nonmanual elements used by interpreters in sign language transliteration.

Gaillard crossed the Atlantic only a few weeks after the United States entered World War I. In his writings, he reports the efforts of American deaf leaders to secure employment for deaf workers to support the war effort. He also witnesses spirited speeches at the National Association of the Deaf convention decrying the replacement of sign language by oral education. Gaillard also depicts the many local institutions established by deaf Americans, such as Philadelphia’s All Souls Church, founded in 1888 by the country’s first ordained deaf pastor, and the many deaf clubs established by the first wave of deaf college graduates in their communities. His journal stands as a unique chronicle of the American Deaf community during a remarkable era of transition.

The newest entry in the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities series explores the richness and complexity of the lives of hearing people in deaf families. Along with their own contributions, volume editors Michele Bishop and Sherry L. Hicks present the work of an extraordinary cadre of deaf, hearing, and Coda (children of deaf adults) researchers: Susan Adams, Jean Andrews, Oya Ataman, Anne E. Baker, Beppie van den Bogaerde, Helsa B. Borinstein, Karen Emmorey, Tamar H. Gollan, Mara Lúcia Masutti, Susan Mather, Ronice Müller de Quadros, Jemina Napier, Paul Preston, Jennie E. Pyers, Robin Thompson, and Andrea Wilhelm. Their findings represent research in a number of countries, including Australia, Brazil, England, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. HEARING, MOTHER FATHER DEAF: Hearing People in Deaf Families includes a comprehensive description of the societal influences at work in the lives of deaf people and their hearing children, which serves as a backdrop for the essays. The topics range from bimodal bilingualism in adults to cultural and linguistic behaviors of hearing children from deaf families; sign and spoken language contact phenomena; and to issues of self-expression, identity, and experience. A blend of data-based research and personal writings, the articles in this sociolinguistic study provide a thorough understanding of the varied experiences of hearing people and their deaf families throughout the world.

Lawrence Newman became deaf at the age of five in 1930, and saw his father fight back tears knowing that his son would never hear again. The next time he saw his father cry was in 1978, when Newman received an honorary doctorate from Gallaudet University, his alma mater. Newman was recognized for his achievements as a life-long advocate for deaf education, including receiving California’s Teacher of the Year award in 1968. Perhaps his greatest influence, however, stemmed from his many articles and columns that appeared in various publications, the best of which are featured in I Fill This Small Space: The Writings of a Deaf Activist. Editor David Kurs has organized Newman’s writings around his passions — deaf education, communication and language, miscellaneous columns and poems on Deaf life, and humorous insights on his activism. His articles excel both as seamless arguments supporting his positions and as windows on the historical conflicts that he fought: against the Least Restrictive Environment in favor of residential deaf schools; for sign language, Total Communication, and bilingual education; and as a deaf teacher addressing parents of deaf children. A gifted writer in all genres, Newman amuses with ease (“On Mini and Midi-Skirts”), and moves readers with his heartfelt verse (“Girl with a Whirligig”). Newman ranges wide in his ability, but he always maintains his focus on equal tights for deaf people, as he demonstrates in his title poem “I Fill This Small Space:” I fill this small space, this time Who is to say yours is better Than mine or mine yours

Deaf Americans have identified healthcare as the most difficult setting in which to obtain a qualified interpreter. Yet, relatively little attention has been given to developing evidence-based resources and a standardized body of knowledge to educate healthcare interpreters. In Our Hands: Educating Healthcare Interpreters addresses these concerns by delineating the best practices for preparing interpreters to facilitate full access for deaf people in healthcare settings. The first section of this volume begins with developing domains and competencies toward a teaching methodology for medical and mental health interpreters. The next chapter describes a discourse approach that relies on analyzing actual transcripts and recordings to train healthcare interpreters. Other chapters feature a model mental health interpreter training program in Alabama, using a Demand-Control Schema for experiential learning, the risk of vicarious trauma to interpreters, online educational opportunities, and interpreting for deaf health care professionals. The second section offers four perspectives on education, including healthcare literacy of the clients; the education of Deaf interpreters; the development of standards for spoken-language healthcare interpreters; and the perspectives of healthcare interpreter educators in Europe. The range and depth of In Our Hands takes significant strides in presenting educational opportunities that can enhance the critical services provided by healthcare interpreters to deaf clients.

At last, Ruth Sidranksy’s groundbreaking book In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World is back in print. Her account of growing up as the hearing daughter of deaf Jewish parents in the Bronx and Brooklyn during the 1930s and1940s reveals the challenges deaf people faced during the Depression and afterward. Inside her family’s apartment, Sidransky knew a warm, secure place. She recalls her earliest memories of seeing words fall from her parents’ hands. She remembers her father entertaining the family endlessly with his stories, and her mother’s story of tying a red ribbon to herself and her infant daughter to know when she needed anything in the night. Outside the apartment, the cacophonous hearing world greeted Sidransky’s family with stark stares of curiosity as though they were “freaks.” Always upbeat, her proud father still found it hard to earn a living. When Sidransky started school, she was placed in a class for special needs children until the principal realized that she could hear and speak. Sidransky portrays her family with deep affection and honesty, and her frank account provides a living narrative of the Deaf experience in pre- and post-World War II America. In Silence has become an invaluable chronicle of a special time and place that will affect all who read it for years to come.

Researchers now understand interpreting as an active process between two languages and cultures, with social interaction, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis as more appropriate theoretical frameworks. Roy’s penetrating new book acts upon these new insights by presenting six dynamic teaching practices to help interpreters achieve the highest level of skill. Elizabeth Winston and Christine Monikowski begin by explaining discourse mapping to enable students to develop a mental picture of a message’s meaning and the relationships of context, form, and content. Kyra Pollitt discusses critical discourse analysis, to reveal some of the cultural influences that shape a speaker’s language use. Melanie Metzger describes preparing role-plays so that students learn to effectively switch back and forth between languages, manage features such as overlap, and make relevant contributions to interaction, such as indicating the source of an utterance. Jeffrey Davis illustrates the translation skills that form the basis for teaching consecutive and simultaneous interpreting to help students understand the intended meaning of the source message, and also the manner in which listeners understand it. Rico Peterson demonstrates the use of recall protocols, which can be used to teach metacognitive skills and to assess the student’s sign language comprehension. Finally, Janice Humphrey details the use of graduation portfolios, a valuable assessment tool used by 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 in the very near future.

From the moment the World Association of Sign Language Interpreters (WASLI) was established in 2005, an overwhelming wave of requests from around the world arrived seeking information and resources for educating and training interpreters. This new collection provides those answers with an international overview on interpreter training from experts in Austria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Fiji, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Kosovo, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland, Sweden, and the United States. Whether from income-rich or income-poor countries, the 31 contributors presented here provide insights on how sign language interpreter training has developed in each nation, and also how trainers have dealt with the difficulties that they encountered. Many of the contributors relate the movement away from ad hoc short courses sponsored by Deaf communities. They mark the transition from the early struggles of trainers against the stigmatization of sign languages to full-time degree programs in institutions of higher education funded by their governments. Others investigate how culture, religion, politics, and legislation affect the nurturing of professional sign language interpreters, and they address the challenges of extending training opportunities nationally through the use of new technology. Together, these diverse perspectives offer a deeper understanding and comparison of interpreter training issues that could benefit the programs in every nation.

The work of interpreters in legal settings, whether they are spoken or signed language interpreters, is filled with enormous complexity and challenges. This engrossing volume presents six, data-based studies from both signed and spoken language interpreter researchers on a diverse range of topics, theoretical underpinnings, and research methodologies. In the first chapter, Ruth Morris analyzes the 1987 trial of Ivan (John) Demjanjuk in Jerusalem, and reveals that what might appear to be ethical breaches often were no more than courtroom dynamics, such as noise and overlapping conversation. Waltraud Kolb and Franz Pöchhacker studied 14 asylum appeals in Austria and found that interpreters frequently aligned themselves with the adjudicators. Bente Jacobsen presents a case study of a Danish-English interpreter whose discourse practices expose her attempts to maintain, mitigate, or enhance face among the participants. In the fourth chapter, Jemina Napier and David Spencer investigate the effectiveness of interpreting in an Australian courtroom to determine if deaf citizens should participate as jurors. Debra Russell analyzed the effectiveness of preparing sign language interpreter teams for trials in Canada and found mixed results. The final chapter presents Zubaidah Ibrahim-Bell’s research on the inadequate legal services in Malaysia due to the fact that only seven sign interpreters are available. Taken together, these studies point to a “coming of age” of the field of legal interpreting as a research discipline, making Interpreting in Legal Settings an invaluable, one-of-a-kind acquisition.

Nineteen international interpreting authorities contribute their research and findings to Interpreting in Multilingual, Multicultural Contexts, the seventh volume in the Studies in Interpretation series. These experts probe the complex nature of interpreted interaction involving Deaf and hearing people of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. They also analyze the contextualized interpreting practices and considerations that transpire from this diversity. In three parts, this trenchant collection shows how Deaf and hearing people use language in fluctuating ways to connect with each other. The chapters in Part 1C Expanding Frontiers: ASL-English-Spanish Interpreting in the United States C consider sign language interpreting at the border between Baja California and the state; trilingual video relay service (VRS) interpreting; and constructing a valid, reliable trilingual interpreting testing instrument. Part 2 C Mediating Indigenous Voices C explores how to construct roles in a Mori Deaf trilingual context; considerations for interpreting signed languages of American Indian Communities; and interpreting for indigenous Deaf clients in far north Queensland, Australia. In the final section, Part 3 C Globalizing: Interpreting in International Contexts C protocols for interpreting in multilingual international conferences are analyzed. The last chapter describes the arduousness of sign language interpreting in multilingual, international settings. It acts as a fitting conclusion to this examination of the challenges to the sociolinguistic repertoire of interpreters mediating across multiplex combinations of culture and language.