Journal of Computer Technology & Applications Review Article
Translation Issues and Problems in Automation of Sign Language
Abstract
Over 466 million people, including 432 million adults and 34 million children, have hearing impairments globally. Deaf persons have extremely little or no access to educational resources and other types of information. While visiting or traveling in public locations in the absence of a sign interpreter, members of the deaf community are typically in an uncomfortable situation. Public announcements made in public spaces are incomprehensible to deaf persons. Without the aid of a sign interpreter, they are still unaware of how to select the counter, gate, or platform number. Due to the lack of common grammatical rules and sign language dictionaries, translating spoken language into sign language is an extremely difficult task. Translation from sign language is fraught with difficulties. Absence of Multilingual Corpora, Non Availability of Domain and Language Independent Sign Language Translation Systems, Non-Standardization of Linguistic and Grammar Rules and Absence of handling non-manual features in Synthetic Animation Avatars of sign language are some open problems and difficulties in automatic sign language translation which are addressed in this paper, along with suggestions for how to overcome them in the future. Deaf people's communication requirements can be successfully met in public settings if these problems and difficulties are handled properly.
Keywords
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