EduSign & SignEdu: Joint Venture of Curriculum Studies and Artificial Intelligence in Sign Language
In Finland and Sweden, deaf people who use sign language have been able to benefit from social sign language interpretation services for more than half a century, which has also enabled equal access to education at all levels and employment in various fields.
In the Balkans, for example in Turkey, training for sign language interpreters is still in its infancy compared to the Nordic countries and the number of sign language interpreters is far from sufficient to meet demand. The EduSign project aims to increase the number of undergraduate programs and certificate programs for sign language interpreters in Turkey. This will also increase the number of qualified sign language interpreters , which will also increase the educational and employment opportunities for deaf people.
The project will develop curricula for the different qualifications and establish an advisory liaison body that will continue the cooperation after the project. The project will also test the integration of an artificial intelligence-based text recognition programme with digital collections of sign languages and see whether the results can also be used for training sign language interpreters.
Objectives
The project will develop model curricula – including preparatory courses – for higher education in sign language interpreting, especially for countries (e.g. in the Balkans) where BA and/or MA degrees are not available.
The project partners will test an AI-based algorithm developed in Turkey using open corpora of sign language for text recognition, in Finnish and Finnish sign corpus environment. In this context, we will investigate how machine translation could be used as a working tool in the training of sign language interpreters.
The project will also set up a advisory liaison body to maintain cooperation between European institutions providing higher education in the field of sign language interpreter training.
| Duration (päivämäärinä): | 03.03.2022 – 03.09.2024 |
| Project manager: | Päivi Rainò |
| Email: | paivi.raino@humak.fi |
| Partners: | Istinye University, Turkey Humak University of Applied Sciences, School of Interpreting and Linguistic Accessibility Stockholm University, Department of Linguistics, Sweden Turkish Confederation of the Deaf Association of Turkish Sign Language Interpreters |
| Funder: | EU: Erasmus+ |
| Budget: | > 100 000 – 300 000 euroa |
| Website: | Linkki |
