14.1 Interpreting, Transliterating & Sight Translation: Choosing the Product
Key Takeaways
- CASLI's exams treat ASL, spoken English, English-like signing or transliteration, and sight translation as distinct source and target products.
- Interpreting abandons the source form and rebuilds meaning in the target language's grammar; transliterating works between forms of the same language and preserves English structure.
- Illustrative Behavior 4.1 explicitly assigns the choice between interpreting and transliterating to the consumer.
- Sight translation has no speaker regulating pace and demands reading ahead, chunking by meaning, and expanding frozen register — without summarizing or explaining.
- The CASLI Generalist Performance Exam expressly requires consecutive, simultaneous, sight translation, or any combination within its six scenarios.
CASLI's Content Outline defines "source and target languages" for the exams to include "ASL, spoken English, 'English-like signing' or transliteration and sight translation." Three distinct products, three distinct sets of decisions — and a consumer's right to choose among them.
1. The three products
| Product | Source → target | Defining feature |
|---|---|---|
| Interpreting | One language → a different language, live | Meaning is extracted from the source form and reconstructed in the target language's own grammar. The output follows ASL or English structure, not the source's |
| Transliterating | Between forms of the same language | English → an English-ordered signed form, or English-ordered signing → spoken English. Lexical and syntactic form tracks the source; the product is not ASL |
| Sight translation | Written text → a signed or spoken rendering, live | The source is a static document; the interpreter reads and renders simultaneously, with no speaker to pace the work |
The distinction that matters most is interpreting versus transliterating. Interpreting requires abandoning the source form — dropping English syntax, function words, and idiom, and rebuilding the message in ASL with spatial grammar, non-manual markers, classifiers, and appropriate expansion. Transliterating preserves English structure and adds mouthing, initialization, and English word order, producing something on the contact end of the continuum.
2. Transliteration is not "easier interpreting"
A persistent misconception treats transliteration as a lighter task because "you just follow the English." Research and practice both contradict this. Transliterating well requires the interpreter to:
- Retain English structure while making it visually coherent — which means continuous decisions about what to mouth, what to fingerspell, what to initialize, and where a purely English construction must be restructured anyway to be intelligible.
- Add ASL features selectively. Competent transliteration is not signed English; it uses non-manual grammar, spatial reference, and conceptually accurate sign choice while keeping English order.
- Manage the mismatch. English idioms, passives, and embedded clauses do not survive word-order preservation, and the transliterator must decide in real time where fidelity to form defeats comprehension.
3. Who chooses
CPC Illustrative Behavior 4.1: interpreters "consider consumer requests or needs regarding language preferences, and render the message accordingly (interpreted or transliterated)." The parenthesis is explicit. The choice is the consumer's.
Two practical consequences:
- Ask. Many consumers will tell you directly. Some will say "whatever you're comfortable with," which usually means "interpret" — but the observation you make in the pre-encounter exchange should inform your default.
- Do not decide by setting. There is no rule that classrooms get transliteration and medical appointments get interpretation. There is a consumer with a preference.
Consumers may also want different products at different moments: full ASL interpretation for the explanation, transliteration when the instructor is teaching English vocabulary or reading a passage verbatim, and sight translation for the handout.
4. Sight translation: the hardest of the three
Sight translation has no speaker regulating the pace, no prosody to cue meaning, and a text written in dense, formal, frozen-register English — consent forms, plea agreements, leases, policy manuals, standardized test items.
Working method:
- Read ahead. Skim the whole document before you begin, or at minimum the paragraph you are about to render. Sight translating cold, sentence by sentence, produces false starts because English legal and clinical sentences bury the operative point at the end.
- Chunk by meaning, not by sentence. A single 60-word contract sentence often contains three propositions; render them as three ASL units.
- Expand the frozen register. "Notwithstanding any provision to the contrary" is a connective, not content; depict the relationship it encodes.
- Keep the document visible to the consumer and track where you are, so they can follow along and stop you.
- Do not summarize. Sight translation renders the document; summarizing it substitutes the interpreter's judgement about what matters.
- Do not explain. Rendering what a consent form says is interpreting. Telling the consumer what it means for their case is counsel, barred by Illustrative Behavior 2.5. Questions about meaning belong to the clinician, attorney, or official — interpret the question, do not answer it.
5. The CASLI Generalist Performance Exam expects all three
CASLI states that the six performance scenarios require candidates to "interpret as appropriate using consecutive interpreting, simultaneous interpreting, sight translations or any combination thereof, within each scenario." So sight translation is not a niche add-on; it is explicitly part of the assessed skill set, and a candidate who has never practised rendering a printed document under time pressure will meet one for the first time on exam day.
6. Naming the product accurately
Under Illustrative Behavior 6.1, interpreters "accurately represent qualifications, such as certification, educational background, and experience." That extends to describing your work honestly. If a consumer asks for ASL interpretation and you are producing English-ordered signing because the content is dense and you are behind, the honest move is to acknowledge it and address the cause — request a repeat, slow the pace, ask for the document — rather than to let the consumer believe they are receiving something they are not.
A Deaf college student asks the interpreter to transliterate rather than interpret for a literature seminar, because she is being assessed on her use of English literary terminology. What does the CPC direct?
Which statement about transliteration is accurate?
During a sight translation of a surgical consent form, the Deaf patient points at a clause and asks the interpreter, "What does that mean for me?" What is the correct handling?