Flemish Sign Language standardisation

Herreweghe, Mieke Van; Vermeerbergen, Myriam

doi:10.1080/14664200903154874

Cited by 48 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…One cannot expect the informants to know all of the signs used in their region or to have produced/remembered all of them during the meetings. That does not mean that non-recorded signs are rejected by the researchers, or that the researchers only wanted to enter standardised signs, as was the case in the Sign Language of the Netherlands STABOL project (Schermer, 2004;Zwitserlood, 2010;Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen, 2009). It simply means that they did not occur in the collected data.…”

Section: Priority Listsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…• 45% there are different signs. The general conclusion was (and is) that to date there is no Standard VGT, but a standardisation process is well under way (Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen, 2009) and that the term VGT can be considered an umbrella term for the different regional varieties of VGT. This nicely corroborates the decision made by Fevlado in 1997 to reject an imposed standardisation from above (or a renewed 'unification'), but to promote the ongoing spontaneous standardisation process.…”

Section: A Standard Flemish Sign Language?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Flemish signers are more actively involved in hearing society, using their sign language to communicate in that society in many different semantic domains, and this results in an exponential growth of the lexicon itself. The diminishing importance of deaf schools, together with an increased contact between deaf people from different regions, has most certainly had a major impact on the spontaneous standardisation process of Flemish Sign Language (Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen, 2009) and it seems possible that the fact that sign languages are being increasingly used for remote communication (which involves signing in front of a camera which in turn impacts on signing space) may in time have a certain impact on the structure of the language itself (Meurant et al, 2013).…”

Section: Concluding Sectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 1997, the Flemish Deaf community rejected an imposed standardisation from above and decided to rather promote the ongoing standardisation process of Flemish Sign Language. This decision and other standardisation issues in Flemish Sign Language were discussed in Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen (2009) (See also Section 2.2.3. ).…”

Section: Introducing Flemish Sign Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

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Looking back while moving forward: The impact of societal and technological developments on Flemish sign language lexicographic practices

Vermeerbergen

Herreweghe

2018

International Journal of Lexicography

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This paper presents an overview of lexicographic projects related to Flemish Sign Language (Vlaamse Gebarentaal or VGT). VGT consists of five regional varieties. There was a time when this lexical variation was considered a disadvantage in deaf education and L2 teaching. That is why in the 1980s and early 1990s the very first lexicographical project related to Flemish signs concentrated on lexical unification in Signed Dutch. However, when the Flemish Deaf community officially rejected the use of Signed Dutch and started promoting VGT, this also led to a change in focus on lexicography. In 2004 the first electronic bilingual Flemish Sign Language/Dutch dictionary was published online. Since by then the Flemish Deaf community had decided not to opt for standardisation from above, it was decided to also include regional variation in the dictionary and to label the regional variants as such. By looking at past and current projects and initiatives planned for the near future, it has become clear that both societal and technological developments have been and are shaping lexicographical work related to Flemish Sign Language. We also look forward to future developments that will pave the way for exciting possibilities with respect to sign language lexicography.

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Section: Priority Listsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Standard Flemish Sign Language?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Concluding Sectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introducing Flemish Sign Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

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Looking back while moving forward: The impact of societal and technological developments on Flemish sign language lexicographic practices

Vermeerbergen

Herreweghe

2018

International Journal of Lexicography

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“…Despite this, our annotations do reflect assumptions about the nature and structure of certain items. We have also taken seriously concerns arising from early codification of signed languages (Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen 2004).…”

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confidence: 99%

Online Delivery of Deaf Studies Curricula in Ireland at Third Level

Nolan¹,

Leeson

Virtual Learning Environments

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Irish Sign Language (ISL), an indigenous language of Ireland, is recognized by the European Union as a natural language. It is a language separate from the other languages used in Ireland, including English, Irish, and, in Northern Ireland, British Sign Language. Some 5,000 Deaf people use ISL. Given the history of suppression of signed languages across what is now the European Union, the average Deaf person leaves school with a reading age of 8.5 to 9 years. It is no surprise, therefore, that Deaf people are the most under-represented of all disadvantaged groups at third level. This poses two challenges: (1) getting Deaf people into third level and (2) presenting education in an accessible form. In the authors’ work, they address directly these challenges in an Irish context, and this chapter reports on this work. In Ireland, two Dublin based institutions, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the Institute for Technology Blanchardstown, Dublin (ITB) have partnered to create a unique eLearning environment based on MOODLE as the learning management system, in the delivery of Deaf Studies programmes at TCD. This partnership delivers third level programmes to students in a way that resolves problems of time, geography and access, maximizing multi-functional uses of digital assets across our programmes. Students can take courseware synchronously and asynchronously. The authors have built a considerable digital asset and have created a re-architected framework to avail of current best practice in rich digital media over Moodle with learning objects for ISL. Their digital assets include a corpus of ISL, the ‘Signs of Ireland Corpus’ which is one of the largest, most richly annotated in the world. They have operated online delivery since 2005, hosted by ITB. The hallmark of this project is the delivery of blended learning, maximizing ICT in the teaching and learning of ISL. It is important to note that there are currently no other universities delivering Deaf Studies programmes with this degree of online content internationally. Thus, this programme and its associated research is cutting edge innovation in its philosophy, its rich content and its utilization of rich media. Signed languages, by their nature, are visual-gestural languages, which (unlike spoken languages) do not have a written form. Given this, the online content is required to be multi-modal in nature and the authors utilize rich-media learning objects in their delivery. Within ITB and TCD, the authors have a number of doctoral level studies linked to this project. These focus, at one end of the continuum, on focusing on Deaf culture and is linked to the perspectives on Deaf Studies teaching modules, and at the opposite end of the continuum on describing, for ISL, the phonological-morphological interface in ISL ad which will enrich the digital corpus of ISL. These feed into the online programme.

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Machine translation from signed to spoken languages: state of the art and challenges

Coster

Shterionov

Herreweghe

et al. 2023

Univ Access Inf Soc

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Automatic translation from signed to spoken languages is an interdisciplinary research domain on the intersection of computer vision, machine translation (MT), and linguistics. While the domain is growing in terms of popularity—the majority of scientific papers on sign language (SL) translation have been published in the past five years—research in this domain is performed mostly by computer scientists in isolation. This article presents an extensive and cross-domain overview of the work on SL translation. We first give a high level introduction to SL linguistics and MT to illustrate the requirements of automatic SL translation. Then, we present a systematic literature review of the state of the art in the domain. Finally, we outline important challenges for future research. We find that significant advances have been made on the shoulders of spoken language MT research. However, current approaches often lack linguistic motivation or are not adapted to the different characteristics of SLs. We explore challenges related to the representation of SL data, the collection of datasets and the evaluation of SL translation models. We advocate for interdisciplinary research and for grounding future research in linguistic analysis of SLs. Furthermore, the inclusion of deaf and hearing end users of SL translation applications in use case identification, data collection, and evaluation, is of utmost importance in the creation of useful SL translation models.

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Flemish Sign Language standardisation

Cited by 48 publications

References 5 publications

Looking back while moving forward: The impact of societal and technological developments on Flemish sign language lexicographic practices

Looking back while moving forward: The impact of societal and technological developments on Flemish sign language lexicographic practices

Online Delivery of Deaf Studies Curricula in Ireland at Third Level

Machine translation from signed to spoken languages: state of the art and challenges

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