Hello HN,
get your videos translated into sign language quickly and easily by uploading them and choosing your favorite language.
After 48 hours you will get your final video.
That's it.
>You are excluding more than 700 million people from your content.
I'm sorry, but that is not a believable stat. You mean to tell me close to 1/10 of the planet is deaf and speaks ASL and doesn't read a written language?
I'm all for the project. I'm 100% in favor of increasing accessibility. I just don't believe that stat.
Are you sure it isn't 700k? That'd be more reasonable considering Wikipedia says a 1972 survey estimated the signing population as between 250k and 500k.
Even 700k would be ridiculous; it implies that not only has the ASL population roughly doubled in the last 50 years, but also that that population is entirely incapable of reading written English. That's clearly not true.
700M is simply ludicrous. Even if that's only taken as the number of ASL signers, that would still make ASL the third largest language in the world, ahead of Hindi and Spanish.
> You mean to tell me close to 1/10 of the planet is deaf and speaks ASL and doesn't read a written language?
While the number is clearly far too large even taking into account what I'm about to say, I think someone doesn't have to not read any written language to be excluded. For many ASL speakers, ASL, not English, is their native language. Although I read French passably, I would consider subtitles available only in French, and not in English, to be serving my needs poorly; and I think the same can be said of an ASL speaker asked to "make do" with English-language subtitles.
And they don't all use ASL, either. Not all deaf people rely on sign language, especially if they became deaf later in life, and there are numerous other sign languages used outside the US which aren't mutually intelligible with ASL.
so presumably not just ASL. In any case, this is probably a sorely needed service, if there are robust production pipelines for subtitling and dubbing in other written languages but not for sign languages.
Sounds too good to be true, you don't mention cost anywhere. You can't scale this without paying interpreters. I dare say, you won't have a 48-hour turnaround on movie-length content either, without a low bar for quality.
> [if you don't use our product] You are excluding more than 700 million people from your content
i assume this is coming from a place where all abilities and disabilities are equal and any kind of value judgement is immoral, so maybe you could find it useful to know that in the real world, 700 million deaf people might find it offensive that you assume they are illiterate
What's surprising about this to me is that ASL has no written form. I found si5s but it doesn't seem incredibly mainstream. I'm curious how people who speak primarily with ASL interact on the internet.
How do people who speak with ASL communicate over long distances without video, if not text? An AMA would be appreciated.
An interesting idea would be processing subtitles to some sort of digital mannequin that makes all of the gestures. I imagine you'd do this by coding all of the sign and finding all of the appropriate mappings, a la translation.
Deaf people were using video to communicate over long distances way before most of us were even aware that was possible. A lot of thought and engineering went into these systems, to make them responsive enough for real time communication. Unfortunately, that technology is being phased out in favor of inferior tech that works over IP. Due to the nature of the protocol, it's quite bad for real time communication -- hearing people are generally satisfied with Zoom because they're using it for audio and a low quality / high latency video feed is tolerable.
ASL is usually "spoken" by the deaf or hard-of-hearing right? For the most part I imagine text would satisfy most cases.
This product's offering seems to be focused on how ASL can deliver on pitch/tone/emphasis/emotion in a way transcription currently doesn't, thus "subtitles aren't sign languahe"
not to mention that watching a video with subtitles means glancing at the text when a new line comes up, while watching a video with a signing translator means having to glance at the signer for every single word, right?
A person who signs regularly can do reasonably well from the "corner of the eye" because they speak / sign in groups all the time. Reading text is not anywhere near as efficient, in terms of understanding while watching other activities going on at the same time.
Also, because it isn't Signed English (which is actually a thing) there is a specific grammar to it that makes it super efficient. That's why it often looks like the signer on political broadcasts isn't telling the whole story, when in fact they might even be telling more of it than text alone could convey.
I have a number of deaf friends and acquaintances (I'm almost deaf in one ear, and HoH in the other, so I have hearing aids), and I know at least from them, that written English is not their forte. A lot of grammar, like adding "ing" to the end of verbs and gerunds, is pretty baffling to someone who hasn't grown up hearing them in speech. Since I actually can hear (just not very well), my spoken/written English is not affected.
Subtitles (like sms or twitter) don't convey tone very well, so in a classic voice over just having the subtitles makes it hard to convey things like sarcasm or innuendo or emphasis or emotion. Sign language has ways to convey all of this.
Think about this sentence:
That's cool.
It's one of those sentences that exists only to convey a tone. Depending on tone it can mean:
* that is in fact cool
* that is in fact NOT cool
* i acknowledge that you have said something
* i agree to your suggestion
and plenty more in contexts where you only know which it means because you can hear the tone of the person.
Many deaf people have poor grammar because American Sign Language (ASL) greatly simplifies and, in some cases, omits things that are not really needed to convey an idea.
To a deaf person subtitles are is overly verbose and the word order is strange (for example, subtitles has "running," which is the word "run" followed by a sign for "ing." ASL does away with "ing" because it is obvious in context).
Uh, no. Sign languages, like American Sign Language, are not "simplistic" versions of spoken languages. They are complete, complex languages with their own robust syntax and grammatical structures. A better way to explain this is that it's like an adult who is natively fluent in one language trying to read subtitles in a second language with which they don't have working fluency and rarely, if ever, speak.
To expand on this, it's commonly believed that sign languages are simplified versions of the local spoken language. Indeed, it wasn't until ~1960[0] that these languages were seriously studied as "real" languages.
At least part of the reason a Deaf person might have poor grammar in a spoken language is because said spoken language is almost always at least their second language.
Sign language is more like watching a movie than listening to radio. It's extremely spatial, with space around the body used to indicate grammatical elements and their relation to each other.
Spoken languages are far more similar to each other than to sign languages.
Subtitles are like watching a movie with the green screen instead of the scenery filled in.
It’s more that English isn’t necessarily their native language, at least if born deaf. ASL is not signed English, it’s roots are French, and as far as I understand that wouldn’t make French their native language either. ASL is their native language, and it has no written form (afaik).
Well and French Sign Language is very different from ASL.
I had a friend who grew up a hearing child of Deaf parents, with two hearing older siblings, so he learned ASL and (American) English in tandem.
By the time I knew him, he also spoke French and French Sign Language because he'd been living in France for several years, and he had fun explaining and showing us some of the differences with his Deaf French friends.
Some of the best technical writers I've met were classmates from the NTID, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology. But I think it was that english was in some ways a "foreign" language that made them so good; They went out of their way to be clear to the point of verbose, probably because it was unnatural and they felt it.
I don't want to sound judgemental, but I learned a little bit of sign language at the time, and the conversations I and friends had in sign seemed... Slangy. ASL is a language that has to deal with it's bandwidth limitations and the fact that it's not quite as broadcast as shouting is. Deaf culture involves a lot of physically reaching out and "Grabbing" the audiences attention; Tapping someone on the shoulder is an attention grabber of last resort for the hearing, while it's the obvious and only way of grabbing the attention of someone who's looking the other direction to the Deaf. Perhaps for that reason I always felt like Deaf people had no concept of personal space (Though my personal intuition is that it's actually literally about the little sounds your movement makes - I've encountered the same lack of personal space at Gun Ranges, where everyone is wearing hearing protection and you'd think that people would want to be separated)
Learning to read is a lot harder for deaf people, yes. For deaf people sign language is their native language, not the spoken equivalent, so imagine speaking one language and having to learn to read another.
I think this is a good question, because I had always thought of American Sign Language (ASL) as a transcription of English.
But I learned that ASL is a language all of its own, grammar and syntax are not always the same.
In college, I learned a bit of a sign language- "C Sign" - that is actually an adaptation of English. At the time, C Sign was the thing that hearing, native English speakers were taught as a way to interact with non-hearing ASL signers. That was thirty years ago, so things might well be different now.
I don't have any direct experience, but some of my extended family are native speakers of Apache or Navajo. These are different languages, but "mutually intelligible" - speaking one can be understood if you know the other. And I traveled in Finland and Estonia - mutually intelligible (utterly impossible for me to use either of them).
I think C Sign might be more of a "pidgin": a simplification of English and ESL that is not used natively, but can be used to communicate.
So, yeah -- it's not wrong to wonder if ASL signers are using English, or are able to read it. I believe the answers to these questions are "not really" and "yes, fluently".
(Perhaps the question was posed in a blunt manner. But that's written, online communication for you -- it's an approximation of spoken interaction, and often lacking in body language or tone. So it's often taken in a way that wasn't exactly the intention... :-) Yay, Language!)
That is because American Sign Language has a different sentence structure and grammar from English. It's a rather understandable result of a person being raised to communicate in one language "verbally" and a different language to communicate in text.
To give one example, ASL puts negation and inquisition at the end of sentences. If I want to ask, "What is this?" in ASL I would point to the thing I am curious about and then sign, "What?"
I'm sorry but, I don't know how it's possible to read that and interpret it to imply that deaf people can't read. It's a strange question to ask. Maybe it's the word order that throws them off.
Your description of ASL here is a red flag. Temporal aspect and grammar are not encoded in specific signs, and the sentence structure is derived from French. I can read some truths into your words here, but it's a damn stretch.
As a hearing person with knowledge of the language and friends in the community, you sound like an barely-informed hearing person with a capitalist-savior complex. If that isn't you, be transparent about who you are and why you're in the business.
This is largely counterproductive. If you are watching something visual, all of the emotions and gestures you need are already there in the video or the original presenter. The only niche this could fill are narration-driven documentaries.
With subtitles you can also do things like spell-check them or suggest edits. If a third party service sends back poor quality signing, it seems like quality control would be just as much work if not more than doing the signing yourself.
Seems like a good service. Will be interesting to see if the 48h turnaround time will be manageable with good quality and at an affordable rate. If yes - that'd be very interesting.
so funny that emojis + black text have become the new norm in logo design.
Cool product though. Would love to see even more accessibility-as-a-service type things. When I was in college I watched a visually-impaired friend try to use Ableton (at the time one of the only DAW's with a screen reader) and it was predictably painful.
I'm sorry, but that is not a believable stat. You mean to tell me close to 1/10 of the planet is deaf and speaks ASL and doesn't read a written language?
I'm all for the project. I'm 100% in favor of increasing accessibility. I just don't believe that stat.
Are you sure it isn't 700k? That'd be more reasonable considering Wikipedia says a 1972 survey estimated the signing population as between 250k and 500k.