In this paper, we would like to share our experience in training up Deaf individuals from the Asian-Pacific countries to compile sign language dictionaries and conduct sign language research through the ‘Asia-Pacific Sign Linguistics Research and Training Program’ at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The program, fully funded by the Nippon Foundation, is a multi-country, multi-phase project which aims at nurturing Deaf people to become sign language researchers through a series of credit-bearing training programs at the diploma and higher diploma levels. The training covers three major areas: Sign Linguistics, Sign Language Teaching and English Literacy. One important part of the training involves the production of sample dictionaries of the Deaf trainees’ own sign languages. To confirm the dictionary entries, the Deaf trainees conduct surveys in the Deaf communities in their home countries from time to time and as a result a substantial amount of lexical variants have been collected. An online database, called the Asian SignBank, is now being developed to house these lexical data and facilitate further research. Apart from basic search functions, the SignBank also incorporates detailed phonetic features of individual signs and a materials-generating function which allows quicker production of dictionaries in the future.
@inproceedings{sze:12022:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Sze, Felix and Woodward, James and Tang, Gladys and Lee, Jafi and Cheng, Ka-Yiu and Mak, Joe},
title = {Sign Language Documentation in the {Asia-Pacific} Region: A Deaf-centred approach},
pages = {155--158},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2012} 5th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Interactions between Corpus and Lexicon},
maintitle = {8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2012)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Istanbul, Turkey},
day = {27},
month = may,
year = {2012},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/12022.pdf}
}