"signing avatars" and other machine interpretation projects

[Karlin, Ben]

I don't think that the signing avatar projects (I am told there are several
in scattered places around the globe including a premiere one in Hamburg)
are based on "Sign is Easy."  From what I have seen they are early attempts
to push technology in all directions.  They marry machine translation,
gesture and speech recognition, video and graphics processing (polygamous
marriage, here) in  an attempt to meet a need.  Some are driven by
economics, others by intellect, others by altruism but my experience has not
been that these are the projects that denigrate signed languages.

My interest in following the projects is that they attempt to codify what
interpreting is.  I am not a linguist but an interpreter and find the cries
for professionalization in my field premature as there is still no good
description of what our work is.  If, by applying flow charts to it, these
folks are able to help us standardize good practices, more power to them.

Ben Karlin <mfkarlb at mail.dmh.state.mo.us>
Lic. Interpreter, St. Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center
The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or
the Missouri Dept. of Mental Health

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Angus B. Grieve-Smith [mailto:grvsmth at UNM.EDU]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 8:36 AM
> To: SLLING-L at ADMIN.HUMBERC.ON.CA
> Subject: Re: "signing avatars" and other machine
> interpretation projects
>
>
> 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
>