UNIVERSITY OF GONDAR

FACULTY OF INFORMATICS
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
POST GRADUATE PROGRAM

Review on machine Translation System for Ethiopian Sign language

By Achenef Behulu

Submitted to: Adane Leta (PhD)

Submission date: January /2020
 Abstract
Sign language is a natural language mostly used by hearing impaired persons to communicate
with each other. At present day, sign language explainers are used to eliminate the language
obstacles between people who are hearing impaired and non-impaired one. However, they are
very limited in number. So, automatic sign language translation system is better to narrow the
communication gap between hearing impaired and normal people.

I. Introduction
Sign language is any means of communication through bodily movements, especially of
the hands and arms, used when spoken communication is impossible or not desirable. In
linguistic terms sign languages are as rich and complex as oral languages, but they are not
real languages, sign languages involve simultaneously combining hand shapes,
orientations and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly
express speaker’s thoughts [4]. They share many commonalities between spoken
languages that is why linguistics consider both to natural languages. Sign language is not
universal by its nature i.e. it depends on the region and culture even in the same country
[2]. Usually sign languages are identified by the country where they are used e.g.,
Ethiopian Sign Language (EthSL) .American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign
language (BSL) etc. This language is communication tool used for different people like
peoples with hearing impairment, sign language newscasters, children’s and adults with
special needs and it’s the most fabulous way to communicate with hearing babies before
he or she can’t speak. According to Ethiopian National Association for Deaf (ENAD),
about 1.5 million deaf people lived in Ethiopia in 1994 E.C, latter in 2000 it’s raised to
2.5 million, and from 8% of peoples with disabilities 2% counts for hearing impaired [3].
These people can communicate each other and the hearing people by using Amharic sign
language (AMSL), with reading and writing techniques. Relative to communication with
reading and writing techniques, communication through AMSL is more preferable for
hearing challenged to hearing challenged people, hearing challenged to hearing people
and hearing people to hearing people. However, there is communication gap among those
peoples so in order to enhance the communication and information exchange among the
hearing impaired community and hearing people it is important to have a research work
on AMSL that will translate written text into an appropriate sign language and back
again. Including hearing impaired people into the common work was very difficult in the
world, mainly due to lack of communication. However, the gap is partially solved by
different researchers who have been researching on methods to develop different
applications about different sign language [2]. However, less developments and research
works have been conducted in Amharic sign language. Moreover, the field is still
somehow hot research area and is not matured well. I believe that working on this issue
will contribute to the growth of the research and development of Amharic sign language
tools.
 II. Machine translation system Ethiopian Sign Language.
There are various researches conducted in the area of sign language. These researches can
be broadly divided into two groups. The groups are
 Sign language synthesis (translation)
 Sign language recognition
Sign language translation focuses on the conversion of input from different medium such
as from text and voice to sign language. This needs the processing of the input and
generating of signs which can represent the input [2]. Sign language recognition deals
with the capturing and analyzing of signs which are generated from the signer and
produce information about the given sign. Different types of techniques are applied to
process the captured image or video and detect a specific sign that the signer needs to
show.
Many researchers have conducted a research work to automate the detection and
translation of Amharic sentences, letter, word or number to Ethiopian Sign Language
using different techniques and methodologies [1][2][3][5][7]. However, some of the
studies turn their concentrations towards recognition and detection of isolated signs of the
Amharic sign languages. Those researches couldn’t able to detect non-manual signs
which are represented by facial expressions and are limited to recognizing basic family
and derived Amharic alphabet signs but don’t consider bastard alphabet and local
numbers, the two researches [1] [6] play a great role in the development of Ethiopian sign
language to fill the communication gap even if others has also its own contribution, but
,the researchers does not take into account the complexity of the source
language(Amharic text) and the ambiguity of the target language (EthSL) i.e. word sense
disambiguation need to be developed while doing the research, apart from the
researchers point of view, all most all of the studies neglect the idea of having two way
communication between the source and the target language and no one has establish or
try to have the grammar rule for the target language by his/her effort or by collaborating
together with others.

The approach and modeling that was adopted in most of the papers used are rule based
machine translation technique, which needs set of written rules done by linguistic and
other domain experts and this is because due to unavailability of large and massive
database of bilingual corpora[1][6]. A few of them uses machine learning techniques,
which requires feature extraction by domain experts in order to make the pattern visible
to the learning algorithm [3] , they need human intervention and the video signs in the
video dataset almost has uniform velocity.
 III. Conclusion
In Ethiopia there are very large number of people who are living with the problem of
hearing. These people are using Ethiopian Sign Language as their communication
medium between themselves. But these people are living with the other part of the
community who communicate with spoken language. The deaf people do not have the
ability to use spoken language while the hearing people do not have the ability to
interpret the sign language. This gap makes the life of the deaf people very difficult.
Researches to narrow the gap of these two communities are very important. I have
described a machine translation of source and target language or recognition system for
alphabetic signs and the whole signing language, taking account to the linguistic but not
the visual information associated with EthSL. Currently all works focus on translation
from Amharic to EthSL or EthSL to Amharic, but translating the other way around from
EthSL to Amharic on the same system of integration is an even more interesting
challenge. If they can create an EthSL recognizer and parser as we have for Amharic, we
would be able to translate signed EthSL to Amharic sentences and back again to allow
real-time interaction. And also all papers are consider only to the sentences level of the
source or target language what if the user input is a paragraph or a document so it should
be enhanced, as far as I am concerned, the system also need to be a smartphone based by
integrating different tools and techniques to make it feasible and usable for filling the gap
further more.

IV. Recommendation
Furthermore to make system usable and accessible of the system the it is better to make
two way communication smartphone based application

References
1. Daniel Zegeye, "Amharic Sentence To Ethiopian Sign Language Translator ", June,
2014
2. Tefera Gimbi, “Recognition of Isolated Signs in Ethiopian Sign Language”,
Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Addis Ababa University, June, 2014.
3. Minilik Tesfaye, “Machine Translation Approach to Translate Amharic Text to
Ethiopian Sign Language” ,Lecturer, Faculty of Informatics, St. Mary’s University
College, P.O.Box 18490, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
4. Merra N., “Sign language in communication “, [online], available:
https://www.slideshare.net/meerapatel999/sign-language-in-communication, [accessed:
12/26/2019].
5. Nigus Kefyalew,” Amharic Sign Language Recognition based on Amharic Alphabet
Signs”, Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Addis Ababa University, March, 2018.
6. Dagnachew Feleke,” Machine Translation System For Amharic Text To Ethiopian Sign
Language”, Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Addis Ababa University, October, 2011.
7. Masresha Tadesse, “Automatic translation of Amharic text to Ethiopian sign language”,
master’s thesis, Addis Ababa University, 2010.