Sign Language Translator

Abstract

The deaf population, unlike the hearing population, encounters many problems in real life because of their inability to hear, and thus the inability to communicate effectively with hearing people. To communicate with others they use Sign Language. The Sign Language used by Sri Lankan deaf community is known as Sri Lankan Sign Language. With the innovations of computer science various items are coming to the market, which translate Spoken Languages to Sign Languages and vice versa. But most of these applications are based on more popular Sign Languages like British Sign Language but not on any lesser popular Sign Languages like Sri Lankan Sign Language. The lack of developments and researches on Sri Lankan Sign Language will restrain the country?s deaf population from entering the information age. In this thesis, a solution for translating text to Sign Language is presented. A desktop application is developed using Java which allows a user to enter any simple sentence as an input text that needs to be translated to Sign Language. The application will parse the text, process it and present the signs via a 3D animation which is developed using Java3D. The 3D animation is a human model which can display basic signs using its hands and fingers. WordNet and Stanford Parser has been used in the text processing layer while MySql is the database which is used to store data. As a proof of concept, the application was implemented and evaluated to translate text from English or Sinhala to Sri Lankan Sign Language. But the significance of this project is that it is language independent. The main advantage of it is that it grows with its usage, as the user can add animated signs with their corresponding words or phrases continuously. The inbuilt dictionary can be used as a global repository for Sign Languages. The goal of this project is to create a tool that will help to translate text to Sign Language. The system was evaluated using sample English and Sinhala sentences. The application has been proven to work successfully if the necessary data was already inserted.