The SIGNSPACE project produced an innovative online environment enabling users of different sign languages to collaborate across linguistic boundaries, and to build their multilingual and meta-linguistic skills. The idea for this 18-month project emerged from the project ‘Multilingual behaviours in sign language users’ (MULTISIGN), which investigated signers’ abilities to communicate in complex multilingual situations. As a ‘Proof of Concept’ project, SIGNSPACE gives signers the chance to use and develop these abilities via a multifunctional online portal. This initiative was based on the views of 63 deaf people, from 25 different countries, in their responses to an online survey prior to the project.
To implement the project, the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) collaborated with the IT company Dolphio Technologies, who created the infrastructure and functionalities of the portal, while UCLan worked on the concept and the interaction with deaf users of the portal. The centrepiece of the development is a sign-to-sign translation tool, the first such system available. Sign language users can upload videos of signs and tag them with written words and with the characteristics of the signs themselves, including the shape of the hand (e.g. fist, flat hand, or spread fingers) and where the sign is made (e.g. on the chest, on the forehead, or in the space in front). Users can search for signs and find the translation equivalents in other sign languages.
The system is designed for deaf people in different countries to upload and share signs with equivalent meanings and create bespoke bilingual databases, so that they can learn each other's signs. The MULTISIGN research had shown that communication difficulties across sign languages are primarily due to the lexicon, and this motivates the focus of the SIGNSPACE system on dictionary-like entries. Unlike other existing systems, users of SIGNSPACE can create personalised bilingual repositories of signs for their specific purpose (for example, signs from Indonesia and the Netherlands about education), and they do not need a written language to search the database because signs are also searchable by handshape and place of articulation. This means that deaf communities with low levels of literacy, particularly in developing countries, can bypass inaccessible written information and collaborate directly with sign language users in other countries via their respective sign languages. This opens up new opportunities for these deaf communities to access information, skills, and support.
In the second part of the project, online lessons were developed to enable deaf signers to build multilingual skills and meta-linguistic awareness because this supports their ability to interact remotely with people who use different sign languages. The nine lessons include examples of real cross-sign communication, directly sourced from MULTISIGN data, as well as examples of cross-linguistic diversity, for example with manual alphabets or signs for numbers. Interactive exercises and signed explanations further support learning.
Throughout the project, the team continuously tested and refined both the lessons and the sign-to-sign translation tool according to recommendations by participants at seven demonstration and training workshops. These workshops took place in India, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Poland and the UK, in order to cover a range of different deaf communities. A total of 150 people participated in the workshops. In its final phase, UCLan organised a real-life field test with a transnational team of deaf sign language users in the UK and India, and the team has identified opportunities for further development of the SIGNSPACE system.
