scholarly journals Interpreting and knowledge mediation in the healthcare setting: What do we really mean by “accuracy”?

Author(s):  
George Major ◽  
Jemina Napier

This paper explores the concept of “accuracy” in the context of interpreter-mediated healthcare interaction by reporting on a study of simulated doctor-patient consultations involving professional Australian Sign Language (Auslan)/English interpreters. Wadensjö’s (1998) taxonomy of renditions is used to analyse the ways interpreters convey health information. Our data reveals that interpreters frequently produce reduced and expanded renditions that are not detrimental to the message or the interaction. There has previously been little discussion of how qualified interpreters make these decisions, and we suggest that achieving accuracy in the healthcare setting may be a more dynamic and context-dependent process than previously suggested. While the use of role-plays can on the one hand can be considered a delimiting factor (due to their artificial nature), they also allow a systematic comparison of different interpreters, thus providing more robust evidence for healthcare interpreter training.

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sílvia Araújo ◽  
Ana Correia

In this paper, we propose an exploratory study about the usefulness of multilingual corpora in areas related to the study of language, translation and, in particular, of simultaneous interpreting. After a brief overview of corpus-based interpreting studies as well as of some existing electronic interpreting corpora, we move on to describe the compilation stages of a bidirectional multimedia corpus (PT--EN/EN--PT). This is followed by an example of how the corpus can be explored, which focuses on the issue of anaphoric relations. The aim of this study if twofold: on the one hand, to convey the relevance of this type of resource as a repository of authentic simultaneous interpreting data; and, on the other hand, to demonstrate that by analysing it from a linguistic perspective it may be possible to identify sensitive areas in simultaneous interpreting (e.g. anaphora), which may prove an important contribution for interpreter training.


2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothy WS Kwok ◽  
Robert A Boakes

In a serial overshadowing procedure, a target stimulus, A, is followed after an interval by a potentially interfering stimulus, B, and this is then followed by an unconditioned stimulus (US). An untested proposal from over four decades ago was that the degree to which B overshadows conditioning of A depends on whether or not the two events take place in the same context. To test this, two experiments used a 1-trial long-delay conditioned taste aversion (CTA) procedure: sucrose served as the target taste (A) and dilute hydrochloric acid (HCl) as the overshadowing taste (B), with lithium chloride injection providing the US. In Experiment 1, these tastes were novel: weaker overshadowing by HCl of an aversion to sucrose was found when the two tastes were presented in different contexts. Experiment 2 tested whether the effect of pre-exposure to HCl, thereby rendering it less effective in overshadowing a sucrose aversion, was also context dependent. In the conditioning session, rats again received either context-same or context-different presentations of sucrose and HCl. However, for some rats, HCl was pre-exposed in the same context to which it was later presented during conditioning (Consistent), while others were pre-exposed to HCl in a different context to the one in which it was presented during conditioning (Inconsistent). The Inconsistent group produced greater overshadowing than the Consistent group and thus confirmed that the latent inhibition effect was also context dependent. This study confirms the concept of situational relevance.


1985 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. Prinz ◽  
Louise Masin

ABSTRACTThis study examined the effects of adult “recasting” in sign language on the acquisition of specific syntactic-semantic structures by six deaf children between 9 and 76 months who were primarily at the one-sign utterance stage of development. In “recast” replies in conversation, the child's utterance is redisplayed in an altered sentence structure that still refers to the central meanings of the first sentence. Syntactic-semantic structures targeted for input intervention by teachers and parents using recasts included subject–verb relations, attribution, negation, subject–verb–object relations, conjunction, and conditionality. Recasting triggered the acquisition of new syntactic-semantic structures in American Sign Language and English which were evident in the spontaneous production of previously non-used sign utterances.


Sign language is a visual language that uses body postures and facial expressions. It is generally used by hearing-impaired people as a source of communication. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 466 million people (5% of the world population) are with hearing and speech impairment. Normal people generally do not understand this sign language and hence there is a communication gap between hearing-impaired and other people. Different phonemic scripts were developed such as HamNoSys notation that describes sign language using symbols. With the development in the field of artificial intelligence, we are now able to overcome the limitations of communication with people using different languages. Sign language translating system is the one that converts sign to text or speech whereas sign language generating system is the one that converts speech or text to sign language. Sign language generating systems were developed so that normal people can use this system to display signs to hearing-impaired people. This survey consists of a comparative study of approaches and techniques that are used to generate sign language. We have discussed general architecture and applications of the sign language generating system.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026553222110389
Author(s):  
Chao Han ◽  
Xiaoyan Xiao

The quality of sign language interpreting (SLI) is a gripping construct among practitioners, educators and researchers, calling for reliable and valid assessment. There has been a diverse array of methods in the extant literature to measure SLI quality, ranging from traditional error analysis to recent rubric scoring. In this study, we want to expand the terrain of SLI assessment, by exploring and evaluating a novel method, known as comparative judgment (CJ), to assess SLI quality. Briefly, CJ involves judges to compare two like objects/items and make a decision by choosing the one with higher quality. The binary outcomes from repeated comparisons by a group of judges are then modelled statistically to produce standardized estimates of perceived quality for each object/item. We recruited 12 expert judges to operationalize CJ via a computerized system to assess the quality of Chinese Sign Language interpreting produced by 36 trainee interpreters. Overall, our analysis of quantitative and qualitative data provided preliminary evidential support for the validity and utility of CJ in SLI assessment. We discussed these results in relation to previous SLI literature, and suggested future research to cast light on CJ’s usefulness in applied assessment contexts.


1999 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irit Meir

In this paper I argue for the existence of an aspectual marker in Israeli Sign Language (ISL) denoting perfect constructions. This marker is the sign glossed as ALREADY. Though this sign often occurs in past time contexts, I argue that it is a perfect-aspect marker and not a past tense marker. This claim is supported by the following observations: (a) ALREADY can co-occur with past, present and future time adverbials; (b) its core meaning is to relate a resultant state to a prior event; (c) it occurs much more in dialogues than in narrative contexts. Further examination of the properties and functions of ALREADY in the language reveals that it shares many properties with perfect constructions in other languages. In addition, it is shown that the co-occurrence of ALREADY with various time adverbials, as well as with the durational aspectual modulation, gives rise to a rich aspectual system in the language. This aspectual system is compared to similar systems in other languages. The ISL system turns out to be very different from that of Hebrew on the one hand, while showing significant similarities to that of ASL. However, there are also some differences between ISL and ASL aspectual markers, which might be due to the relative youth of ISL, and to the different source for the aspectual marker: a verbin the case of ASL, and an adverb in ISL.


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