DARS-DHHS SPONSORS INTERPRETER TRAINING AT SWCID
Once again the DARS Office for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services
(DHHS), as a part of its 2009 Texas Interpreter Education Series, made
a gallant effort to upgrade interpreter skills by providing what is
called “week-long training” at SWCID in Big Spring. This time, one
part of the Series was on training deaf interpreters—and was
probably the first such intensive and lengthy training ever provided
for deaf interpreters in Texas, or in this country. In welcoming the
group of 34 participants, David Myers, DARS-DHHS Director, said Texas
has been slow to use deaf interpreters. He sees the demand increasing
and wants to be able to meet that increasing demand.
Of the deaf individuals who spent five days last week immersed in the
program, some are already BEI Certified Intermediary Interpreters,
while others are preparing themselves for certification. Deaf
interpreters in Texas must be certified, either by BEI or RID, to
qualify for most intermediary interpreting assignments, while
interpreting in court requires court certification. Intermediary
Interpreting generally involves a deaf interpreter who is
exceptionally skilled in ASL and English and who teams with a hearing
interpreter to provide highly specialized and skilled interpreting
services to deaf individuals who may have language limits.
This deaf interpreter training was coordinated by Ann Horn of
DARS-DHHS and Byron Bridges of CSD of Texas, who also served as
trainers. Other trainers were Eileen Forestal from New Jersey, Gino
Gouby from Washington, DC, Trenton Marsh from Utah and Lauri Metcalf
from San Antonio. Participants also came from other states, including
New Mexico, Oklahoma and Arkansas, and from as far away as California.
A second week-long interpreter training at SWCID was for trilingual
interpreters, the third such training sponsored by DARS-DHHS in as
many years. This carefully screened group of 21 participants were
fluent in Spanish, English and ASL. The focus was on upgrading their
skills. Trilingual interpreting is an emerging profession that gives
recognition to the communication needs of Hispanic deaf individuals
whose first language may be ASL and whose family’s first language is
Spanish. Later this year the BEI will begin to test and certify
trilingual interpreters with tests that were developed for DARS-DHHS
by the University of Arizona. The trilingual training was coordinated
by Yolanda Chavira of DARS-DHHS and the instructors were Gina Gonzalez
from Austin, Carmen Garcia from New York, Adriana Guevara from Houston
and Jorge Dieppa from El Paso.
Randi Turner, DARS-DHHS Training and Advocacy Coordinator, headed up
the planning effort for this training and served as liaison with SWCID
for making arrangements for the use of their facilities, and served as
the on-site facilitator for both trainings. The partnership with SWCID
is especially important as this is the 5th consecutive year that
DARS-DHHS has used their facilities for interpreter training The
training also involved partnering with ASL Services (Florida), CSD of
Texas, Sorenson VRS and Viable VRS; their contributions were
invaluable.