Experiments in sign language machine translation using examples

Abstract

Sign langauges (SLs) are the first langauge of the Deaf communities worldwide and, just like other minority languages are poorly resourced and in many cases lack political and social recognition. As a result of this, users of minority languages are often required to have multi-lingual competencies in non-L1 languages. In the case of SLs, this causes considerable hindrance to Deaf people as the average literacy competencies of a Deaf adult are equated with those of a 10-year old. To alleviate this, we propose the development of an automatic machine translation system to translate from spoken language text to SLs through the medium of a signing mannequin