In healthcare, the accuracy of interpretation is the most critical component of safe and effective communication between providers and patients in medical settings characterized by language and cultural barriers. Although medical education should prepare healthcare providers for common issues they will face in practice, their training often does not adequately teach the communication skills necessary to work with patients who use interpreters. This new volume in the Studies in Interpretation series addresses critical topics in communication in healthcare settings around the world.

     Investigations in Healthcare Interpreting consists of ten chapters contributed by a broad array of international scholars. They address topics as diverse as the co-construction of medical conversation between interlocutors, healthcare interpretation in Ireland, and how interpreters make requests for clarification in their work. Using a variety of methodological approaches including ethnography, questionnaires, observation, and diary accounts, these scholars report on trials of simultaneous video interpreting in Austrian hospitals; direct, interpreted, and translated healthcare information for Australian deaf people; the interpretation of medical interview questions from English into ASL; and specialized psychological/psychiatric diagnostic tests for deaf and hard of hearing clients. Researchers, practitioners, and students, as well as all healthcare professionals, will find this volume to be an invaluable resource.

The Fifth Volume in the Studies in Interpretation Series

In interpreting, professionals must be able to convey to their clients the rhythm, stress, and length of phrases used by the communicating parties to indicate their respective emotional states. Such subtleties, which can signal sarcasm and irony or whether a statement is a question or a command, are defined in linguistics as prosody. Brenda Nicodemus’s new volume, the fifth in the Studies in Interpretation series, discusses the prosodic features of spoken and signed languages, and reports the findings of her groundbreaking research on prosodic markers in ASL interpretation.
     In her study, Nicodemus videotaped five highly skilled interpreters as they interpreted a spoken English lecture into ASL. Fifty Deaf individuals viewed the videotaped interpretations and indicated perceived boundaries in the interpreted discourse. These identified points were then examined for the presence of prosodic markers that might be responsible for the perception of a boundary. Prosodic Markers and Utterance Boundaries reports on the characteristics of the ASL markers, including their frequency, number, duration, and timing. Among other findings, the results show that interpreters produce an average of seven prosodic markers at each boundary point. The markers are produced both sequentially and simultaneously and under conditions of highly precise timing. Further, the results suggest that the type of prosodic markers used by interpreters are both systematic and stylistic.

This volume brings together the best research presented at the first International Symposium on Signed Language Interpreting and Translation Research. Editors Brenda Nicodemus and Keith Cagle have gathered an international group of contributors who are recognized leaders in signed language interpreter education and research.

       The ten papers in Signed Language Interpretation and Translation Research cover a range of topics, including the need for Deaf perspectives in interpretation research, discourse strategies and techniques that are unique to video relay call settings, the benefits of using sociology as a lens for examining sign language interpreting work, translating university entrance exams from written Portuguese into Libras (Brazilian Sign Language), the linguistic choices interpreters make when interpreting ASL figurative language into English, the nature of designated interpreting, and grammatical ambiguity in trilingual VRS interpreting. The research findings and insights contained here will be invaluable to scholars, students, and practitioners.