Hybrid translation system from Turkish spoken language to Turkish sign language

Abstract

Sign Language is the primary tool of communication for deaf and mute people. It employs hand gestures, facial expressions, and body movements to state a word or a phrase. Like spoken languages, sign languages also vary among the regions and the cultures. Each sign language has its own word order, lexicon, grammatical rules, and dialects. According to these features, a sign language also differs from the spoken language that it represents. The aim of the study is to implement a machine translation system in order to convert Turkish spoken language into Turkish Sign Language (TİD). The advantages of the rule-based and the statistical machine translation techniques are combined into the hybrid translation system. The proposed system is evaluated with Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) scoring metric and it is proved that the hybrid translation approach performs better than rule-based and statistical approaches.