Interpretation and the explicitation process

Historically, most research has focused on the ability of sign language interpreters to
work from English as a source text into American Sign Language (ASL) as a target text.
Little has been done on their ability to work from ASL into spoken English. To address
that gap, a pilot study was done to examine the English target texts of 22 interpreters
who were asked to simultaneously interpret 4 short ASL monologues. The focus of this
pilotwas on the incorporation of the articles, “a/an” and “the” and the coordinating conjunctions,
“for,” “and,” “nor,” “but,” “or,” “yet,” and “so” in the participants’ English target
texts. The findings indicate that the interpreters did include these even when an
equivalent structure was not produced as a manual, lexical item by the native signers in
their ASL stories. Their adaptations served to potentially strengthen the English target
texts by possibly reducing the cognitive load needed to comprehend the utterances by
an English-speaking audience, and indicate that decisionswere made by the interpreters
to include these structures.