Sign language interpreter training has been offered at the universities of applied sciences in Magdeburg and Zwickau since 1997 and 1998, respectively. Both training programs are set in the institutional context of East German universities that experienced a major reorganization after the unification of Germany. The training programs share an applied perspective in research and teaching as well as many of the features typical for small scale academic ventures in a developing field. Thus, provision of teaching materials and, more particularly, sign language video resources, adequate in content, format and technical quality, has been a constant concern. Of necessity, a hands-on approach had to be chosen for the last ten years, and both programs have amassed a diversity of analogue and digital video films. In most cases, the only way of accessing this material consists in picking the brains of those colleagues who may have worked with some video clip or exercise suitable for one’s own didactic or research purposes. As it happens, Magdeburg as well as Zwickau have installed the same type of digital training facilities (‘video lab’) in 2007. These video labs consist of individual workstations linked to a central video server that hosts all the resources in a unified digital format. For both institutions, a major challenge consists in organizing a process that will transform and complement existing sign language materials so as to create an accessible library of video resources for research and training purposes. Our presentation will report on our joint efforts to do the first steps in this direction. The following aspects will be discussed:
Legal and ethical issues: Up to now, questions of ownership and property rights have often been dealt with somewhat casually. Building up a digital library of video resources implies that such questions have been formally clarified. However, just what the conditions for using video materials gathered informally, passed on from one colleague to the next or published on the internet are, may be hard to decide.
Administrative and technical prerequisites: In order to create a solid basis for the desired cooperation and be able to access university funds, the two universities concerned will enter into formal agreements on the mutual use of video resources. This in turn, demands that there are clearly defined ways of synchronizing, complementing and accessing the respective collections of resources.
Criteria for annotating and archiving video resources: While the process of digitizing and storing existing video materials can be dealt with somewhat mechanically, the development of systematic ways of annotating and organising sign language materials is crucial in order to make digital resources accessible. Clearly, this is an area where progress has been made in recent years, e.g. in the context of the ECHO project (‘European Cultural Heritage Online,’ cf. http://www.let.ru.nl/sign-lang/echo/index.html). We will add to this discussion by considering the more specific demands of sign language interpreter training and research.
@inproceedings{hemann:08024:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {He{\ss}mann, Jens and Vaupel, Meike},
title = {Building up Digital Video Resources for Sign Language Interpreter Training},
pages = {74--77},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Thoutenhoofd, Ernst D. and Zwitserlood, Inge},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2008} 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora},
maintitle = {6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2008)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Marrakech, Morocco},
day = {1},
month = jun,
year = {2008},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/08024.pdf}
}