Providing Accessibility to Hearing-disabled by a Basque to Sign Language Translation System

Abstract

Translation between spoken languages and Sign Languages is especially weak regarding minority languages; hence, audiovisual material in these languages is usually out of reach for people with a hearing impairment. This paper presents a domain-specific Basque text to Spanish Sign Language (LSE) translation system. It has a modular architecture with (1) a text-to-Sign Language translation module using a Rule-Based translation approach, (2) a gesture capture system combining two motion capture system to create an internal (3) sign dictionary, (4) an animation engine and a (5) rendering module. The result of the translation is performed by a virtual interpreter that executes the concatenation of the signs according to the grammatical rules in LSE; for a better LSE interpretation, its face and body expressions change according to the emotion to be expressed. A first prototype has been tested by LSE experts with preliminary satisfactory results