Artistic Sign Language Translation

A recent article in The Star Online deals with the difficulties of translating artistic speech, such as that in plays, into sign language. "A play is an artistic expression and thus requires the interpreter to express the target language in a similar way, artistically." Also, to translate a play, the interpreter must take on the roles of various characters. Most importantly perhaps, the interpreter must try to exist solely as a bridge of the language barrier and not as the centerpiece or the performance. He or she must facilitate the understanding of the play, without becoming the the focus of the audience.

Something that struck me as interesting in reading the article was that the interpreter was translating from English directly into Malaysian Sign Language (MSL). I suppose that since MSL is a language all its own, it is natural to translate directly from English into it, but I had nevertheless assumed, prior to reading the article, that to translate to MSL, someone had to be speaking Malaysian. It's interesting that both deaf and hearing Malaysians can understand English after only one translation.

Looking further into sign language interpretation, I found that a machine now exists which can recognize sign language symbols ninety-nine percent of the time. I doubt the machine is able to translate the grammar, but it is nevertheless interesting to know that technology has made it possible for deaf people to communicate words (though still not complex phrases or ideas) to a hearing audience. As far as I can tell, sign language to hearing machine translators are just as reliable as machine translators between two hearing languages--which is to say they are generally unreliable owing to the subtleties and artistic nuances of human expression.