The Natural Means Of Communication

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Chapter 1

Introduction

Background

Avatar for text to British Sign Language will be developed in collaboration with TECHNABLING. This company develops and manages digital technologies that help and support people in achieving and retaining better abilities, lifestyle and independence. This includes technologies that help people around the home, at work and in many areas of their daily lives.

This project is a part of Technabling’s Portable Sign Language Translator project (PSLT). The PSLT system allows people with hearing impediments and the speech disabled people to be able to communicate with the wider community. PSLT is a 2-way system that (i) renders sign language as written text on a display and (ii) renders written text as sign language. Developing a 3D Avatar for this project would be challenging, since it requires identification of open source technology to program the Avatar and also a method to translate a sentence into sequence of BSL hand gestures needs to be devised.

Spoken Language is the natural means of communication in human interactions. However, communication barriers can be produced by language variations between the participants in a conversation which is often the case in cross-modal languages such as spoken and sign languages. Sign language is the only method of communication for most of the deaf community. Every nation has its own sign language, which is a proper language and is fundamentally different from a spoken language. A French deaf person’s native language is French Sign Language, while (spoken) French is only the second language. A British deaf person’s native language is British Sign Language (BSL), while second language is English. It is the most common and widely used method for signed communication amongst the deaf community in the UK. It is a very challenging task for a deaf individual to learn the second language, since it has to be learnt based only on a set of written symbols and observations of mouth patterns which are highly ambiguous, and no auditory cues to support it. This is almost an impossible task; as a result many deaf individuals leave school with significant problems in reading and writing.

To make written materials such as web pages more accessible to deaf users, pre-recorded videos of human signers are used. A video’s content cannot be modified after production which makes it impossible to use them in dynamic or interactive scenarios such as announcements in an airport. In addition, appearance parameters such as clothes, gender, lighting cannot be adjusted, production cost is too high, and videos cannot be anonymised which forces the signers in the video to reveal their identity. Therefore implementation of signing avatars would eliminate the production cost, adjustments can easily be done and the identity of the content producer is not disclosed and can be used in dynamic and interactive scenarios. Sign language avatars could be used in various applications such as interactive e-learning, automatic translation of web pages or simple announcement services in airports and train stations.

British Sign Language (BSL)

British Sign language is the first or preferred sign language for most of the deaf people in the UK. There are 125,000 adult deaf and an estimated 20,000 children in UK who are using BSL [1] . According to 2011 census, 15,000 people reported themselves to be using BSL as their main language [2] . Many people who are not deaf also use the BSL, such as employers of Deaf people, sign language interpreters, hearing relatives of deaf people, or people in contact with the British deaf community.

BSL is a visual-gestural language without conventional writing form. It consists of its own grammar which involves movements of the hands, body, face and head and also non-manual features such as facial expressions. BSL uses the grammar which is completely different to the grammar used in English.

Regional Variation

A Sign language can vary from one country to another, even though their first language is English, e.g. British Sign Language is different from American Sign Language (ASL), Northern Ireland Sign Language (NISL) and Irish Sign Language (ISL). British Sign Language also has regional dialects e.g. signs used in the northern parts of England might differ from those used in the southern part of the country

Components of BSL

Spatial grammar and simultaneity

Sign languages have the unique features of the visual medium, whereas oral language is linear, which means only one sound can be made or received at a time. Since sign language is visual, whole scene can be considered at once. Different information can be expressed simultaneously by loading it into several channels e.g. in English when you say "I drove here" .To include more information about the drive , you might have to make the sentence longer by saying "I drove here along a narrow road" or even add a second sentence "I drove here . It was a pleasant drive". In BSL, however, the information about the shape of the road or the pleasing nature of the drive can be conveyed by inflecting the motion of the hand or with the help of non-manual signals such as facial expression and body posture , at the same time while the verb ‘drive’ is signed .

Finger Spelling

Finger spelling is the way of representing the letters of English alphabet. They are generally mixed with signing and are used especially for nouns (people’s names, name of places, names of everyday object etc.) BSL uses a two-handed manual alphabet system, while other countries like the USA (ASL) uses a one –handed system. Figure 1.1shows the finger spelling in BSL.

Figure 1.1 BSL fingerspelling alphabet right-handed version.

Placement

Placement refers to placing or establishment of signs in space. The signer places particular referents within the signing space. The signer has to set up the ‘placement’ of a particular sign E.g. ‘the car is over there’, the word ‘car’ is signed and then putting it in the space in front of him (placing it), the signer can then use his directional verbs and eye gaze to refer to this particular sign.

Report Outline

The following is a brief outline of this report

Chapter 1 ….

Chapter 2 …