Toward machine translation linguistic issues of Indian sign language

Abstract

Sign language is a gesture-based language for communication of deaf people. It is basically a nonverbal symbolic language which is usually used to speak with and by deaf people. Indian sign language is a linguistically under-investigated language. Research on Indian sign language linguistics is also limited because of unavailability of standard sign dictionary and the unavailability of such tools which provide any education for Indian sign language. In the interpretation between sign language and verbal spoken language, there is an intermediate step in which the sign language needs to be represented by some written notation. However, there is as yet no standard notation for Indian sign language. In this paper, we investigate intermediate notation form for sign language as suitable for the machine translation. We also discuss the challenges of other linguistic issues for machine translation on Indian sign language.