[umanwizard]

> American Sign Language is not English

I'm not sure I understand your point. Chinese is also not English but machine translation of Chinese to English can be done.

You're right that laypeople often assume, wrongly, that a given country's sign language is an encoding of the local spoken language. In reality it's usually a totally different language in its own right. But that shouldn't mean that translation is fundamentally impossible.

[lolinder]

They didn't say it's fundamentally impossible, they said you need way more than 5000 hours to do it and that you'd need better quality sources than news interpreters.