Essay On Sign Language

Abstract— With the increasing need of the translation systems, research is being done in the Linguistics field and effort is being done in the development of the translators to assist hearing impaired people. Translation systems are able to convert an input into Indian Sign Language Text and then further into Sign Language symbols. Since, Indian Sign Language has its own syntax and grammar so a system is needed that can convert each sentence from English/Hindi grammar to ISL grammar.

Keywords-component; Machine Translation, NLP, indian sign language, deaf, mute, ISL.

I. INTRODUCTION

DEAF and MUTE are the terms used for the people who are not able to speak or hear or in some cases both. These people are quite introverted due to the limited

Out of these people, 76-89% of the Indian Deaf have no knowledge of language, either signed or spoken/written [8]. The reason behind the low literacy rate can be either of the following:

1) Lack of Sign Language interpreters.

2) Unavailaility of ISL tool.

3) Lack of researches on ISL.

Rest of the paper is organized as follows: section II describes the Indian Sign Language Grammar, section III specifies the review of previous research that has been done in this field, section IV discusses the challenges faced and finally, conclusion of paper is described in section V.

II. ISL GRAMMAR

Indian Sign Language has its own grammar. It is not dependent on the spoken language - English or Hindi. The sign language is not the manual representation of spoken English or Hindi language. It has certain unique and distinct features which are described in [2] like:

1. Number Signs are represented with appropriate hand gesture for every sign.

2. The signs for family relationships are preceded by signs for ‘male/man’ and

Survey Conducted

We conducted a survey [15] among students of age group 12-25 in various blind schools in Chandigarh to know better, the problems faced by the deaf and mute community in a real time scenario as opposed to an assumption based on individual opinions of what are the problems they are facing.

They were asked if they are aware of any such systems available. As shown in Figure 3, 90% of the students were not aware of any such existing systems and almost everyone was interested in some application which would help them in communicating with other people. When asked about the platform preferred, they were keen on the development of some kind of mobile application and that too on android (shown in Figure 4) as 95% of the students were having android phones while only 2 students were having windows phone and 1 was not having a smartphone. Currently, almost all of them preferred using imo messenger as a means to communicate. They use it for video chatting. We also asked the students their preferred means of communication. Figure 5 shows only a few students preferred Braille over sign language. According to our survey, they also face problems in communicating using sign languages when they go to other places due to the lack of a standardized