sign language parsing

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, G Sapountzaki wrote:

> The input will be written typed text and the output will be signed
> animated video on screen. The project is a joint effort between 3D
> animation video experts and linguists. At this first point we aim to
> parse very simple sentences in GSL, still retaining as many as possible
> of the phonological characteristics of GSL,not only manual signs.

        I'm still trying to figure out why you need machine translation to
store some Greek Sign Language sentences.  Is the idea to have a human
translate them into a spoken language (presumably Greek, but Bengali would
make almost as much sense) and then have the software automatically
translate them every time they need to be displayed?  Why not just store
them in written Greek Sign Language?

        Machine translation has made very slow progress over the years.
It is still clunky and unnatural, and it would be doing a disservice to
the entire population of Greek schoolchildren to pass the output of a
machine translation program off as an example of fluent Greek Sign
Language.  You wouldn't teach the kids English entirely through this
website (http://www.worldlingo.com/wl/Translate), I hope?

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