An approach to animating sign language: a spoken English to sign English translator system

It has been one of our long-standing commitments to aid the social integration of the deaf community into the mainstream of society. One such means to this end is the development of assistive techniques to automatically translate sign language. This paper discusses a technique for translating English into its visual counterpart, Signed English. Such an endeavor requires the creation of an application that has the ability to take written or spoken language and generate an animated gesture sequence representative of its content. This application consists of three main portions: a means by which English language can be input into the system, an algorithm that analyses the input and provides correlating kinematic data to an animation process, and a virtual avatar that acts as an interpreter conveying the information.