"The Fourth Volume in the Interpreter Education Series"
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.

Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village -- an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness -- is at the heart of "Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind." There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now.

A "New York Times" reporter trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox is the only Western journalist to have set foot in this remarkable village. In "Talking Hands, " she follows an international team of scientists that is unraveling this mysterious language.

Because the sign language of the village has arisen completely on its own, outside the influence of any other language, it is a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man's inborn capacity to create language. If the researchers can decode this language, they will have helped isolate ingredients essential to all human language, signed and spoken. But as "Talking Hands" grippingly shows, their work in the village is also a race against time, because the unique language of the village may already be endangered.

"Talking Hands" offers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world -- languages as beautiful, vital and emphatically human as any other -- explaining why they are now furnishing cognitive scientists with long-sought keys to understanding how language works in the mind.

Written in lyrical, accessible prose, "Talking Hands" will captivate anyone interested in language, the human mind and journeys to exotic places.

This illustrated text offers a unique approach to using American Sign Language (ASL) and English in a bilingual setting. Each of the 25 lessons involves sign language conversation using colloqualisms that are prevalent in informal conversations. Each lesson includes equivalent expressions in English, plus: glossed vocabulary review; translation exercises from ASL to English and to ASL; grammatical notes; substitution drills; and suggested activities. The text also includes practice tests and a glossed alphabetical index.

The Perigee Visual Dictionary of Signing is the easiest, most comprehensive alphabetized guide to American Sign Language (Ameslan) available today. Unlike other signing books, which organize by "categories", the Visual Dictionary is arranged in a straightforward easy-to-use dictionary format. Inside you'll find special features offering a fast, simple approach to the art of signing, including over 1,350 signs - arranged alphabetically with directions on how to form each sign; detailed illustrations - showing precise hand positions and exact movements; memory aids - to assist in recalling how to make each sign; sample sentences - to clarify grammatical usage; numbers - from one to one million, including monetary signs; fingerspelling - a vital tool for communicating words for which there are no signs, or for when the sign has not yet been learned; helpful hints - suggestions and tips for easier signing; and comprehensive index - including all entries and their synonyms for easy cross-referencing.

The recent recognition of sign languages as legitimate human languages has opened up new and unique ways for both theoretical and applied psycholinguistics and language acquisition have begun to demonstrate the universality of language acquisition, comprehension, and production processes across a wide variety of modes of communication. As a result, many language practitioners, teachers, and clinicians have begun to examine the role of sign language in the education of the deaf as well as in language intervention for atypical, language-delayed populations.
This collection, edited by Patricia Siple and Susan D. Fischer, brings together theoretically important contributions from both basic research and applied settings. The studies include native sign language acquisition; acquisition and processing of sign language through a single mode under widely varying conditions; acquisition and processing of bimodal (speech and sign) input; and the use of sign language with atypical, autistic, and mentally retarded groups.
All the chapters in this collection of state-of-the-art research address one or more issues related to universality of language processes, language plasticity, and the relative contributions of biology and input to language acquisition and use.

Only recently has linguistic research recognized sign languages as legitimate human languages with properties analogous to those cataloged for French or Navajo, for example. There are many different sign languages, which can be analyzed on a variety of levels--phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics--in the same way as spoken languages. Yet the recognition that not all of the principles established for spoken languages hold for sign languages has made sign languages a crucial testing ground for linguistic theory. Edited by Susan Fischer and Patricia Siple, this collection is divided into four sections, reflecting the traditional core areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Although most of the contributions consider American Sign Language (ASL), five treat sign languages unrelated to ASL, offering valuable perspectives on sign universals. Since some of these languages or systems are only recently established, they provide a window onto the evolution and growth of sign languages.

In a book with far-reaching implications, Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi present a full exploration of a language in another mode--a language of the hands and of the eyes. They discuss the origin and development of American Sign Language, the internal structure of its basic units, the grammatical processes it employs, and its heightened use in poetry and wit. The authors draw on research, much of it by and with deaf people, to answer the crucial question of what is fundamental to language as language and what is determined by the mode (vocal or gestural) in which a language is produced.

In the late 19th century, the so-called "German Method", which employed spoken language in deaf education, triumphed all over the Western world. At the same time as deaf German schoolchildren were taught to articulate and read lips, an emancipation movement of signing deaf adults emerged across the German Empire. This book tells the story of how deaf people moved from being isolated objects of administration or education, depending on welfare or working in the fields, to becoming an urban middle class collective with claims of self-determination. Main questions addressed in this first comprehensive work on one of the world's oldest movements of disabled people include how deaf organisations emerged, what they fought for, and who was left behind.

This English version of "A Language in Space: The Story of Israeli Sign Language", which received the Bahat Award for most outstanding book for a general audience in its Hebrew edition, is an introduction to sign language using Israeli Sign Language (ISL) as a model. Authors Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler offer a glimpse into a number of fascinating descriptions of the ISL community to which linguists and other researchers may not have access. An underlying premise of the book is that language is a mental system with universal properties, and that language lives through people.
A clear and engaging read, "A Language in Space "addresses relevant aspects of sign language, including the most abstract questions and matters related to society and community. Divided into three parts, the book covers:
*the linguistic structure of Israeli Sign Language;
*the language and its community; and
*a broad depiction of ISL and the contribution of sign language research to linguistic theory.
This book is intended for linguists (with or without a background in sign language), psychologists, sociologists, educators, students, and anyone with an interest in the human capacity for language.