Miss-Delectable
New Member
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2004
- Messages
- 17,160
- Reaction score
- 7
Online Dictionary For The Deaf West Palm Beach, Boca Raton, Treasure Coast local news, weather, live radar, investigative from Newschannel 5 | WPTV.com
"I think it will make communication better in general, in families. I think it will make learning sign language a lot easier for people."
Joan Poole Nash
ASL Linguistic Research Project
LOST IN TRANSLATION
LOST IN TRANSLATION: If you’ve ever played the childhood game “telephone” where you whisper a saying into your neighbor’s ear until it is passed around a circle, you know how easy it is for words to get lost in translation. In this game, phrases such as “She bought eggs to bake a cake,” can turn into, “She brought ice and broke a plate.” If communicating can get tricky for those of us who can speak, what happens when using American Sign Language is your only outlet? What happens if your deaf child comes home from school and starts signing signs you’ve never seen before? Since 90-percent of all deaf children have hearing parents, difficulty communicating often occurs. Locating a sign in the dictionary is not as simple as looking up a word. Fortunately, new technology will assist in looking up and teaching new signs, making life a lot easier for those who are deaf. Joan Poole Nash, ASL Linguistic Researcher at Boston University is working on an interactive video project that will permit a person to demonstrate a sign in front of a camera and a computer program will interpret as well as explain the meaning. Nash was inspired by the Helen Keller story and recognized the need for a more universal deaf dictionary. Carol Neidle, professor of linguistics at Boston University, explained to Ivanhoe, “The idea is that you should be able to produce a sign in front of a web cam, and the computer will recognize based on the visual properties of what you’ve just done, what sign it is that you produced.” The goal is to create a large vocabulary bank of over 3,000 signs. The sign is interpreted by movements in the hand, arm and face. Gallaudet University, a leading university for the deaf, determined that there are more than 20 million deaf Americans and about one million are children. Therefore, Nash’s product will make communication a lot easier for many families who have a deaf child. Now, a deaf child could sign something their parent does not understand and the parent could sit down at the computer, replicate the sign into a webcam, and the program would translate the sign.
FOUND: A 2007 Modern Language Association of America study found that sign language is the fourth-most studied foreign language in U.S. colleges. American Sign Language is a language used by the deaf community, a complicated visual-spatial language that is completely linguistically complete. Despite what many think, ASL is not similar to English in any grammatical way and has more in common with spoken Japanese than English. It is a “gestural” language, meaning that not only hand gestures are used, but also facial expressions such as eyebrow and lip-mouth movements. By making use of surrounding space, ASL can describe items, places, and people who are not present. It is difficult to communicate when you’re not using the same language. That is why Nash and her team are making a difference in the lives of millions.
SMART WOMAN CONTACT:
Carol Neidle
Boston University
(617) 353-6219
"I think it will make communication better in general, in families. I think it will make learning sign language a lot easier for people."
Joan Poole Nash
ASL Linguistic Research Project
LOST IN TRANSLATION
LOST IN TRANSLATION: If you’ve ever played the childhood game “telephone” where you whisper a saying into your neighbor’s ear until it is passed around a circle, you know how easy it is for words to get lost in translation. In this game, phrases such as “She bought eggs to bake a cake,” can turn into, “She brought ice and broke a plate.” If communicating can get tricky for those of us who can speak, what happens when using American Sign Language is your only outlet? What happens if your deaf child comes home from school and starts signing signs you’ve never seen before? Since 90-percent of all deaf children have hearing parents, difficulty communicating often occurs. Locating a sign in the dictionary is not as simple as looking up a word. Fortunately, new technology will assist in looking up and teaching new signs, making life a lot easier for those who are deaf. Joan Poole Nash, ASL Linguistic Researcher at Boston University is working on an interactive video project that will permit a person to demonstrate a sign in front of a camera and a computer program will interpret as well as explain the meaning. Nash was inspired by the Helen Keller story and recognized the need for a more universal deaf dictionary. Carol Neidle, professor of linguistics at Boston University, explained to Ivanhoe, “The idea is that you should be able to produce a sign in front of a web cam, and the computer will recognize based on the visual properties of what you’ve just done, what sign it is that you produced.” The goal is to create a large vocabulary bank of over 3,000 signs. The sign is interpreted by movements in the hand, arm and face. Gallaudet University, a leading university for the deaf, determined that there are more than 20 million deaf Americans and about one million are children. Therefore, Nash’s product will make communication a lot easier for many families who have a deaf child. Now, a deaf child could sign something their parent does not understand and the parent could sit down at the computer, replicate the sign into a webcam, and the program would translate the sign.
FOUND: A 2007 Modern Language Association of America study found that sign language is the fourth-most studied foreign language in U.S. colleges. American Sign Language is a language used by the deaf community, a complicated visual-spatial language that is completely linguistically complete. Despite what many think, ASL is not similar to English in any grammatical way and has more in common with spoken Japanese than English. It is a “gestural” language, meaning that not only hand gestures are used, but also facial expressions such as eyebrow and lip-mouth movements. By making use of surrounding space, ASL can describe items, places, and people who are not present. It is difficult to communicate when you’re not using the same language. That is why Nash and her team are making a difference in the lives of millions.
SMART WOMAN CONTACT:
Carol Neidle
Boston University
(617) 353-6219