This is what made me think it's about sign->English translation.
Just my opinion, but that's not quite a true analogy. A translator (and I'm thinking here of my experience with spoken languages) will (or should) learn slang, colloquialisms, and so on. Example: I know a bit of French and a significant amount of German, though not enough to interpret either. As early as second year in French, we were talking about colloquialisms like "wey-wey" for oui, and in German, we spent a lot of time talking about dialectal German (as opposed to the proper Hoch Deutsch, or High German) - pronunciation differences, regionalized slang, etc. Things like, in most cases, although the German word for keyboard is "Tasstitur" (sp?), you should use "keyboard" (with a German accent).
You may be correct that ITP programs don't deal enough with the different types of signing (voiced and unvoiced, ASL/PSE/SEE), but that's very different.
