CheckITOut - IT in Wycliffe

I'm involved in an event called CheckITOut - a couple of hours of info about IT in Wycliffe on 6 April 2013 in Coventry. We've got a number of speakers covering some interesting areas. I did a Prezi to advertise it.

My public speaking engagements in 2012

I've read a couple of blog posts recently where people have outlined their public speaking engagements this year. Now I get to do it too!

Actually there's only one.

We're having the Wycliffe Conference at our church on 4th February 2012. I'm doing a session entitled "Tech Transforming Translation". What I'm planning to do is try and condense our Check IT Out day (which we're unfortunately not running this year) into 50 minutes.

So it's going to be a bit of a roller coaster ride. At the moment I'm planning to cover the following topics:

• Using media (videos, CDs, websites, mobile phones, mp3 players) for distributing Bibles
• Translating sign languages
• Complex fonts
• IT support in harsh conditions (dust, heat, humidity, lightning, dodgy electricity supply)
• How you can use your IT skills to help missions, without leaving this country - MissionAssist (formerly Wycliffe Associates UK)

More details on our Wycliffe Conference page.

Sign Language Translation in Wycliffe Magazine

The Wycliffe UK magazine "Words for Life" is out and the focus this month is on Sign Language Bible translation.

Supporting Deaf Sign Language translation

This is a bit old, but here's an interview with Dee and Shawn Collins about their involvement in Sign Language translation. We met Dee and Shawn when they came here a couple of years ago, so there's a personal interest in what they've been doing.

Geoffrey Hunt and sign language

Geoffrey Hunt is the man behind sign language Bible translation in one of our parter organisations. Here's an article about him and sign language Bible Translation.

Sign language project has a website

The WordSign project that I mentioned previously - Update on Sign Language project - has it's own website - wordsign.org.

(Via the Wycliffe UK blog).

Update on Sign Language project

I've been following the progress of a project to develop tools for producing sign language Bibles and there has been little external stuff to point you to though I have where I could. Now however the latest issue of the JAARS (the technical bit of our organisation) magazine Rev 7 (PDF) has an article about it. It has a name now - WordSign and there are more details on this sign language project on the JAARS website.

Sign Language Bible translation

The Sign Language Conference that was held here at the Wycliffe Centre is over, but some of the delegates came to visit our weekly "Centre Fellowship" meeting yesterday. It was quite a multi-lingual experience as we had three translators, all speaking English as well as a different sign language, and the Swedish sign language speaker had to speak American Sign Language as her translator didn't know Swedish sign language. They emphasised a few basic facts about sign languages:

1. There are many sign languages around the world, maybe over 400, that are as different as any two spoken languages.
2. There is no British Sign Language Bible, although work is in progress. If you're reading this then you speak English. Imagine if your only Bible was in French.
3. Sign Language translations have to be done in the context of the culture they will be used in.

There is more material on Sign Language translation on the Wycliffe International site:
Sign Languages FAQ
Innovations in Sign Language translation
The Silent Language

Sign Languages conference

I've blogged about sign languages before and I've just found out that we're hosting a sign languages conference here at Wycliffe UK this weekend.

Sign language project details

More details on the sign language project I mentioned earlier.

It's called WoSP which stands for World Sign Processor. It's "an attempt to
provide software to help the Deaf and others as they work on recording
sign-language data".

The WoSP notation will be a computer readable notation which contains the
component parts of signs, and also allows computers to generate rough 3d
animation and SignWriting ready for final editing. It needs to capture the
essence of signs, without missing out on detail, such as facial movements
and body movement, and without over-complicating things, such as capturing
the position of every finger to the micrometre.
Getting signs into the encoding is another challenge. "Just use motion
capture" I said to a colleague when discussing it. The trouble is motion
capture isn't a simple technology and converting lots of motion capture data
to the sign encoding is another challenge. The preferred method may be a
combination of choosing an existing sign plus some keyboard input, though
things are at an early stage.

Getting the information out again is the third challenge. Ideally you want
- static diagrams, maybe with arrows
- animated diagrams
- computer animated figures
all from the same source of signs.

There are other, smaller, challenges on the way, such as how you move from
one sign to another without the hands suddenly jerking.

Here are some more relevant links:

There's an excerpt from our prayer DVD on the subject of sign language
translations of the Bible.

For analysing sign languages for translation purpose there is Elan
- "a professional tool for the creation of
complex annotations on video and audio resources "

tags: sign language

Relevant prayer topics

From the current prayer page on wycliffe.net (changes weekly) two items that are relevant to me:

Bible translation consultation for sign languages follow-up England. Thank you for praying for this April 16-20 event. Nearly 40 people attended, including Deaf people, members of Bible translation projects, and administrators from several agencies. Praise God for the enthusiasm and ideas that were generated as people shared their work with each other. Many important questions were discussed, such as, "What extra skills do translation consultants need in order to work effectively with sign language teams? Pray that God will continue to guide each agency and team into effective strategies so that his Word will soon be available in the heart languages of Deaf communities across Europe and West Asia.

Biblical Hebrew consultant arrives safely in heaven UK to Glory. Steve Bartram was focusing on the 'Key Terms in Biblical Hebrew' interactive lexicon project which will help translators who don't have a good grasp of Hebrew to understand how the important Hebrew words and concepts were understood by the original writers. It is especially aimed at translators who don't speak English as their first language as they have very few resources available to them. Steve was also part of a team that is trying to develop computer tools to help record sign languages. He went to be with the Lord on Monday April 30. Ask God to comfort his family and all who mourn his death."Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints." Psalm 116:15

I would often see Steve at coffee break. :-(

tags: Wycliffe, sign language

Sign language conference at the Wycliffe Centre

We have a conference about sign language here at the Wycliffe Centre. You can get a bit of info from the Collins who are attending.

There is some juicy technical stuff about representing sign languages on computers that I've heard about, but I haven't got time to get it written down now.

tags: sign language

Sign language

Recently, one of my colleagues whose wife trained as a teacher the deaf, explained to me why we are bothering to translate the Bible into sign languages when deaf people can read written languages too in most cases. His wife's answer when he asked that question was that sign language is not a flat linear language like written and spoken languages are - it's a performance taking place in front of the person, with their hands as the actors, and their head and body as the set and the props. I found that very interesting.

I found out a few years ago that British Sign Lanuage (BSL) is a separate language to English, and it puts words in different orders to the way we do. The person who told me this gave me an example where they said, in sign language, "I sold my baby carrots". In BSL the adjective (baby) follows the noun (carrot), so when she said this there was a gasp of horror when she said "I sold my baby..." and a smile of recognition when they realised what she meant, even though she said it wrongly.

Another of my colleagues is exploring ways to help over 40 signed language communities who don't have the Bible in their language. I haven't spoken to him recently about it, but when I did a while back it sounded like it was using some cool stuff. I'll find out more, but I thought I'd get this entry up now. There's an article in our magazine about it.

tags: sign language
Bible
Bible translation