When showing our brand new Bloom books with Sign Language videos to the deaf people that ‘signed’ them for us, their first response was; WOW!
Their second response was, can you turn on the highlighting, like in the ‘Talking Books’?
Highlighting here, will greatly enhance the educational value of these books to new learners!
In case you’re interested in the current looks a Sign Language books for Bloom Reader;
Visit our website:
http://educationforlife.sil.org.pg
As you know (but many do not), each sign language is its own language, not some kind of motion-ized version of the spoken/written language. So in a good, non-literal adaptation, there would not necessarily be a one-to-one correspondence with the written sentences. So highlighting wouldn’t make a lot of sense.
If this was implemented by having the signer translate one sentence at a time, it might well lead to unnatural translations. And I think it would just be painful for the signer?
Hi John,
I indeed have very little knowledge on Sign language. Fortunately, I now know quite a bit about PNG SL. I helped find
many errors while filming.
Anyway, PNG SL IS very much a motion-ized version of English! You could indeed not do a word for word highlighting, but
a sentence or even phrase highlighting would work fine.
I wasn’t thinking about Signing per sentence, but about a system where you tell Bloom; Highlight sentence 1 when video
plays 0-12sec, Highlight sentence 2 while video plays 13-25sec.
Both the deaf consultant and the deaf guy himself liked that idea very much.
To me it seemed like a lot of work, but I to like the idea very much!
Kind regards,
Koen