Reading Between the Signs: Intercultural Communication for Sign Language Interpreters

Listen up ITP trainers! "Reading Between the Signs" is a true gem and should be required reading for all students in Interpreter Training Programs nationwide. Mindess and her publisher's copy editors possess the requisite skills to render a typographically error-free book with pleasing margins and fonts, unlike Alcorn and Humphrey's "So You Want to Be an Interpreter," a required text of many ITPs. Unlike Alcorn and Humphrey, who dutifully introduce and briefly discuss cross-cultural differences and how they influence sign language interpreting, Mindess thoughtfully and thoroughly takes the reader on an extended journey with deep, eye-opening analysis and a plethora of real-world examples that interpreters encounter every day. It's easy to understand the content with so many supporting examples of it throughout the text. Like an engaging movie, play, or book that requires the moviegoer, theatergoer, or reader to use his/her critical thinking skills and comparisons to one's own experiences to what s/he experiences in that particular media, Mindess' book goes by quickly, because the content is so well-developed and on-point. I found this book quite by accident. It was on a reading list of an online course I took to prepare for the NIC Knowledge Exam. I found it to be extraordinarily helpful in filling in the gaps I had regarding cross-cultural communication between the hearing and Deaf communities. It answered a lot of questions I had and I felt much better having read it before taking the NIC Knowledge Exam (which I successfully passed). A must-have on your professional bookshelf!