Advantages of ASL GLoss for SignWriting

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
March 28, 2004

On Mar 28, 2004, at 10:44 AM, Angus B. Grieve-Smith wrote:
> One thing I'm surprised about is that the SignWriter manual has
> ben translated into Spanish and German (IIRC), but not into ASL, LSE or
> DGS, or any other sign language.  There are videos in ASL, but do they
> cover typing techniques?  That may be a valuable project for someone
> who
> knows more ASL than me...

Actually I did start a video, where I was typing on the SignWriter
computer program, and a Deaf man named Denny Voreck was signing in ASL,
explaining what I was doing in ASL, while I was typing...That was
supposed to become a video in its own right...but then the editing
between computer screen shots and his signing, and adding English
captions and interpreter's voicing became too costly for us, and the
project got shelved...and then time marched forward and new computer
programs started to be developed and it seemed like a financial
investment that wasn't worth it...but I could try to find that old
footage and see if I could make some web movies of it...I actually am
not so sure that would solve the typing issues though...I think we need
to have workshops with hands on experience for people - learning to
type from a video is not very easy, even in the hearing world for other
programs..

As to why the manuals got translated in spoken languages first...that
is obvious. Hearing people who know how to translate from one spoken
language to the other, and who know how to type those languages, could
create a translation faster between spoken languages, than between a
signed language and spoken language...because none of the hearing
people developing those translations were as skilled with typing
SignWriting as they were with typing spoken languages...like a catch-22
isn't it!?....Ha!   Val ;-)