Romania COUNTRY REPORT

• Population:21.6 millions inhabitants. The majority of the people are Romanian with just over 7% Hungarian and minorities of Roma, Germans and Ukrainians.   
Deaf people are estimated at 30.000, so 0.134% from the population

• Size of the country: 237,500 sq. km  in South East Europe and is bordered by the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine.

• Currently there are no accredited sign language interpreters in Romania. The practitioners that are also interpreters are in general CODA, teachers for the deaf, employees of the National Association for the Deaf.The 17 persons that finished last year the sign language course need to be accredited according to the new law.

•We do not have at this moment a National Association of Sign Language Interpreters, but we have ATR, the Association of interpreters and translators in Romania.

Interpreter Training/Educational centers:

The National Association for the Deaf provides in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Research and the Bucharest University, the only recognized course that trains interpreters.

There are initiatives to develop Sign Language courses and Training for Interpreters but the only recognized according to all the standards has the following modules: General and social psighology, Deaf culture and History , Elements and strategies of ommunication, Sign Language Vocabulary, Interpreting-Retro version- Translation, Law and counceling, Practice in the public institutions

In October 2006 we developed a pilot project offering a Romanian Sign Language Course to students at the Babes-Bolyai University, Faculty of Letters department of Applied Modern Languages. We were honored to be welcomed in the “family of languages”, as sign language was recognized as a language with its own identity.
The department of Applied Modern Languages that we collaborate at the “Babes Bolyai” University, trains translators and spoken language interpreters at BA and MA levels with consistent pedagogical support from the Directorate General of Interpretation of the European Commission. Starting this academic year it was introduced Romanian Sign Language as a 3rd foreign language (this entails an elective training programme of 6 hours weekly for the students majoring in Translation or Interpretation who already have language competence in two spoken foreign languages) and in this context the quality of the interpreters training developed considerably.

The most important event

The most important event for the situation of Sign Language interpreters in country was the recognition of the legal right of Deaf people to have interpreters according to the new law: 448. As we are from the 1st of January a member of the European Union, the most important was the law recognition of Sign language as a unique language and the right of deaf people to have interpreters in all the settings.

What are your goals for the future?

A very important task is to establish the National Association of Sign Language Interpreters and in collaboration with the National Association of the Deaf to develop the interpreting services. Romanian Sign Language and interpreter’s training  to be studied within a context of higher education. We will collaborate with the European colleagues to learn from their experiences the best way to develop the profession.
In the long run we would like to develop the programme  to train Sign Language interpreters to a full extent to cover the gap existing to date in the Romanian context.

Goals  for the coming year

To set the accreditations criteria as the interpreters that are skilled to be accredited.

To encourage people to participate at Sign Language Courses all over Romania and than to study to be professional interpreters.

To set the formal papers for founding the National Association of Sign Language Interpreters.

Respectfully submitted by
Farcas Oana and Nicoleta Dutica