In the springof2001,NortheasternUniversity’sboardoftrustees approved a faculty resolution that the university convert from a quarter system to a semester system. Instead of four 11- or 12-week quarters per academic year, there would be two 15-week semesters and two intensive, 71⁄2-week summer sessions. Most courses would be four credits, and students would normally carry sixteen credits per full semester. The board determined that the conversion would take place in the fall of 2003. This conversion afforded programs the opportunity to revise their curricula in whole or in part. The American Sign Language Program, already in the process of exam ining its language curriculum, decided to use this opportunity to revise its interpreting curriculum. The principals involved in the re vision of the interpreting curriculum were Cathy Cogen, Robert Lee, and myself. We decided to base our revision on two primary factors, the theoretical and philosophical influences that had shaped our current curriculum and the extent to which our current curricu lum prepared graduates for the types of interpreting situations into which they would be placed. Theoretical and Philosophical Influences In 1983 the biennial Conference of Interpreter Trainers (CIT) in Monterey, California, invited educators from college and university spoken-language-interpretation programs to share their experiences and perspectives on curriculum sequencing and assessment. This CIT, as well as presentations by spoken-language-interpreter edu cators at subsequent CIT and Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) conventions (see McIntire 1984, 1987), has had significant impact on the design and implementation of sign language inter preter training and education programs in the United States. It is ironic that in 1965 the first organization of sign language interpret ing, the National Registry of Professional Interpreters and Trans lators for the Deaf, when searching for a new name, rejected sug gestions from spoken-language interpreters that the name reflect the languages being worked with and instead changed the organiza tional name to RID. Among the significant new foci for sign language-interpreter curricula after 1983 was the recognition of the usefulness and importance of translation and consecutive interpre tation in enabling students to isolate and hone certain skill sets be fore they encountered the time pressures imposed by simultaneous interpretation. This recognition has led to a quite commonly ac cepted sequence of skill-set development (translation → consecu tive interpretation → simultaneous interpretation) that in many programs takes the form of separate courses. The organizing prin ciple underpinning this skill-set sequence is the gradual introduc tion of the pressures of real-time interpreting. In translation courses the production of the translation is fully separated in time (time shifted) from the production of the original. In interactions in which consecutive interpretation is used, the production of the in terpretation is partially time shifted, and in simultaneous interpre tation the production of the interpretation is in real time. Of course, because simultaneous interpretation is never temporally synchronous, there is a sense in which simultaneous interpretation is time shifted, at least at a micro, or phrasal or sentential, level. At a macro level, however, simultaneous interpreters create the illusion of temporal synchrony by striving not to alter the initial and termi nal boundaries of interactions.
