News from Japan and a plea for help

[Mark Penner]

Well, since Wayne broke out of his lurking place, maybe I should too.
Actually, I hardly qualify even as a lurker anymore, since I haven't kept
up on reading the posts in my "SW Unread" box for ages--but . . .

Part of the reason is that we're working madly to translate and revise the
first four chapters of the Spanish SW book(replacing LSE examples with
Japanese Sign Language examples). I've gotten somewhat proficient at
piecing together Japanese Signs from Parkhurst's SW bitmaps (better
resolution than SW4.4), but it still takes more time than I wish.

And the reason for the mad rush to finish this job is that Feb 15 we'll be
holding the first SignWriting workshop in Japan. I've been meeting weekly
with a couple of Deaf people for almost a year to learn SW together and
figure out how to apply it to Japanese Sign Language. We're finally taking
the next step and offering what we've learned to the rest of the Deaf
community.

I'm hoping for some help. Since we feel it is pushing hard to cover the
first four chapters in one day, and won't have the rest of the book ready
for quite a while, we want to at least give out a list of all the symbols
in the system with illustrations of each. We can pick these out of the
illustrations in the Spanish SW book and assemble them in a list, but if
someone has already done something like that, it would be SO much simpler
to steal (or buy) their work. If not, we will do our best to get it done in
the next two weeks and make it available to everyone out there too, not
just Japan (!!) But for all the work that has been done in schools
throughout the world, I'm thinking (hoping) someone must have something
like this available.

I've attached a picture from the Spanish SW book to give you an idea of
what we're after in case my description is too vague. Of course, for
printing, we'd want better resolution if possible (I shrunk it for the
internet), but at this point, anything is better than nothing.

Mark

BTW, I was delighted to be able to download the Spanish SW books off the
web. We had already scanned chapters 1-4 (we had permission to adapt them
for use in Japan), and tried to work with text boxes to cover up the
Spanish with Japanese, but it is so much easier with the downloaded Word
version. Thanks SO much!
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Mark and Mary Esther Penner
Tokyo, Japan
penner at world.cbi.org