EASIER is Horizon 2020 project, trying to advance machine translation of sign languages. One of the goals of our project is to identify current sign language documentation projects in Europe. “Language documentation” means dictionaries and annotated corpora—that is, video resources of people signing naturally that have been coded for linguistic content. After conducting extensive research, we recently published a report of these projects across the EU. You can find it here: D6.1 Overview of datasets for the SLs of Europe.
You will see that this report shows that no language documentation was found in several EU countries! These countries include Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Romania, and Slovakia. Also, within Spain no documentation for Valencian Sign Language nor Catalan Sign Language was found, and it is also not known if any documentation of Swiss-French or Swiss-Italian variants has been done.
As a next step, the EASIER project partners, Prof. Onno Crasborn and Dr. Hope Morgan at Radboud University are looking for anyone currently working on language documentation in these countries—or perhaps someone who will start a language documentation project. It is important that these under-documented languages of the EU are not overlooked when multilingual machine translation systems become functional.
If you have any information about a recent online dictionary or corpus project for sign languages in any of these countries — or a tip about someone who may be doing this — please contact Dr. Hope Morgan at hope.morgan(at)ru.nl
Here is what we will do with this information:
- We will publish a list of what we found about projects in under-resourced countries in a future EASIER report (D9.2 Overview of resources in the making).
- We will create materials about doing sign language documentation that can support any new or recent language documentation projects in these countries.
These efforts will promote the uptake of new technologies for more sign languages and more Deaf communities in Europe. Will you help us? #HelpEASIER
