Sign Language Machine Translation Systems: A Review

The goal of this chapter is to cover Sign Language preliminaries and a global survey of Sign Language Machine Translation Systems with particular reference to Indian Sign Language. For computer technology to make sense, it is imperative to have social relevance, and the ability to serve across sections of human society where there are physical impairments. Whereas the growth of IT applications in different Real-life domains has boosted research in assistive technology for persons with physical disabilities and for those who are visually impaired, there has been significantly less IT-enabled technical aid observed for persons with Hearing Impairment. Sign Language has been a prominent source of communication in this community for social connections. The difference in modalities of Spoken and Sign Language has been one of the natural reasons for communication barriers between the Hearing Impaired and the rest of society. Advances in Machine Translation systems have triggered the idea of translation between Spoken Language and Sign Language. In this chapter, we analyze different issues and aspects of Sign Language Machine Translation Systems such as translation methodology, grammatical features, domain, output interpretation, and handling of simultaneous morphological features. We review published work on Sign Language Machine Translation Systems and have identified the gaps in reported systems and have proposed a tool to handle simultaneous morphological features of sign languages at run time.