Best Practices in Educational Interpreting

Ms. Seal has put together a valid and worthy book about the need for changes in how interpreters are trained who will be interpreting in education environments. With the push for inclusion and placement of deaf and hard-of-hearing children in public schools, it is more than about time that someone wrote concerning the need for more intensive training of interpreters to keep up with the knowledge base and subjects that are required in school. In a situation where information is received non-directly from the teacher, if the interpreter doesn't know or understand the subject, faulty information is given to the student. Yet when the student makes the mistakes on testing because of misinformation, it is they who must pay the price. This is not a funny subject, but since I've been through college with a variety of interpreters with different abilities, I understand of what Ms. Seal speaks. In a neuroscience medical class, an interpreter who was hired because he was cheap and had no certification, misinterpreted the medical term 'olfactory' as 'old factory'. That was bad enough for an adult, but to give that type of information to children on which to base continued learning would be a crime. This book should be read by all those in special education and those training interpreters throughout the U.S.--it should definitely be required reading, and I plan to use it in future teaching and recommendations to science teachers through out the U.S. Karen Sadler University of Pittsburgh