Marathi to Indian Sign Language Machine Translation

Machine translation has been a prominent field of research, contributing significantly to human life enhancement. Sign language machine translation, a subfield, focuses on translating spoken language content into sign language and vice versa, thereby facilitating communication between the normal hearing and hard-of-hearing communities, promoting inclusivity.

This study presents the development of a ‘sign language machine translation system’ converting simple Marathi sentences into Indian Sign Language (ISL) glosses and animation. Given the low-resource nature of both languages, a phrase-level rule-based approach was employed for the translation. Initial encoding of translation rules relied on basic linguistic knowledge of Marathi and ISL, with subsequent incorporation of rules to address 'simultaneous morphological' features in ISL. These rules were applied during the ‘generation phase’ of translation to dynamically adjust phonological sign parameters, resulting in improved target sentence fluency.

The paper provides a detailed description of the system architecture, translation rules, and comprehensive experimentation. Rigorous evaluation efforts were undertaken, encompassing various linguistic features, and the findings are discussed herein.

The web-based version of the system serves as an interpreter for brief communications and can support the teaching and learning of sign language and its grammar in schools for hard-of-hearing students.