"signing avatars" and other machine interpretation projects

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Franz Dotter wrote:

> We should also deal with the systems offered which promise to
> translate spoken/written languages to sign languages automatically
> (the latest is signtel, see below), signing avatars, etc. concerning
> the acceptance of such (imperfect!) aids for communication.

        Thanks for posting this!  I'm living about two hours from North
Haven by train, and I'm embarassed to hear about this project by way of
Austria.  I don't know where they got their Linguistic Team Members, but
they're not from any part of the linguistic community that I have contact
with.

        I have to deal with this kind of thing on a regular basis, and I
don't really know what to do about it.  I think it's an instance of two
general tendencies in industrialized culture:

1) People assume that if they use language, it must be easy to work with.
They see linguists as nitpicking ivory-tower academics who are trying to
hold back Progress.  It happens all the time in computational
linguistics, and frequently in other fields: see Deborah Cameron's
_Verbal Hygiene_ for some examples.

2) People assume that sign languages are simple, or are just variants of a
spoken language.  I'm sure everyone on this list is familiar with this.

--
                                -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
                                Linguistics Department
                                University of New Mexico
                                grvsmth at unm.edu