Sign Language Dictionary of Technical Terms for Education

Technical terms are vital in scientific and technical fields, acting as concise shorthand to convey complex ideas, but they can also make prose dense; clarity can be improved by tailoring terms to the audience, providing definitions and including a glossary in each one’s first language. Deaf students often face significant challenges in education because sign languages, their first languages, and spoken languages are distinct, with different structures and limited overlap. Forcing deaf students to study through spoken or written languages they do not master undermines equity and inclusivity, particularly in higher education, where technical vocabulary is often lacking in sign languages. This creates barriers to understanding and progress, leaving deaf students at a disadvantage in fields requiring specialized terminology, ultimately hindering their academic and professional aspirations. To overcome such barriers, we need tools that can introduce and explain technical concepts from specific areas of knowledge to deaf students in sign language.

The purpose of the TechWhiz project was to advance inclusive higher education by tearing down the barriers that deaf students face when coming across new concepts that have no corresponding sign language sign, thus requiring an explanation for a swift takeover of new knowledge in a specific study field. TechWhiz aimed to assist deaf students gaining equal access to education and enhance their learning experience. The specific objectives of the project were: - develop an online semi-automatic platform to dynamically create, maintain and search a glossary providing explanations of technical or scientific terms in national sign languages, - deploy a version of a glossary for the study fields of Information Technologies and Electrical Engineering in the partners’ sign languages (Portuguese, German, Slovenian Greek and Cypriot sign languages), - empower non-expert users to understand and effectively use the TechWhiz platform.

TechWhiz delivered an assistive technology tool that generates explanations for scientific and technical concepts from any study fields, using a 3D avatar to present these explanations in national sign languages. Key project activities included developing and deploying the TechWhiz platform, a web application openly available online that integrates four components developed by the project, creating a sign language dictionary available in each partner national sign language, creating a tool to configure sign animations and maintain national sign languages vocabulary, implementing a gloss loader, setting up a glossary for the study field of IT and Electrical Engineering in all partners’ national sign languages, verifying and validating results, integrating the TechWhiz platform with VirtualSign - VirtualSign is a sign language translation technology developed at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto - and preparing a training course facilitating the swift exploration of the TechWhiz platform by non-expert users. Besides these technical tasks, the partnership took over several transversal activities, including the revision of the state of the art, regular project meetings, organization and participation in staff training sessions, dissemination, quality assurance, project management and fund raising and establishment of cooperation agreements to assure the exploitation of project results. The assignment of project activities and responsibilities to partners, along the project lifetime and beyond the funding period to assure sustainability, respects partners field of operations, their main competences and interests. During the project time span, additional care was taken to distribute the leadership of core work units among all partners to promote active participation, commitment and sense of ownership.

TechWhiz delivered an assistive technology platform that generates in real time sign language explanations of concepts searched by the end-users. These explanations are either previously translated onto sign language, by sign language experts, or automatically searched in public online dictionaries and automatically translated to sign language. When a user searches for a term, the TechWhiz platform searches the database to find an explanation that might have been previously generated. If there is such an explanation, the 3D avatar plays it in the selected national sign language. When the TechWhiz database has no previously generated explanation, the tool searches for an explanation (in spoken language) using online dictionaries previously defined for each language, retrieves it as a text snippet, translates it into the national sign language gloss of the user and plays it using the 3D avatar. This platform is composed of several components, the main outputs of the project: TechWhiz Dictionary, TechWhiz Gloss Loader, TechWhiz Studio, the TechWhiz Course and the online video tutorials. These tools are grounded on the TechWhiz database, a database of sign language vocabulary and gloss translations in all partners’ sign languages (Portuguese, German, Slovenian, Greek and Cypriot sign languages). Besides these software applications and its underlying database, we are proud to have started a PhD by a deaf student at the Hellenic Mediterranean University, that is expected to be concluded in 2025, and to have the TechWhiz platform being exploited by two associated partners, Agrupamento de Escolas Dona Maria II, in Braga, a special needs school in the north of Portugal (through its Science Club) and IDEC S.A., Piraeus, a high-tech and training company based in Greece. We are initiating contact with the Portuguese Rehabilitation Institute to offer the TechWhiz Course through their course catalogue. Another unforeseen result of the project is SignVET, a KA2 grant awarded by the Erasmus+ Portuguese National Agency, that will introduce TechWhiz to vocational education. Another critical outcome of the project is the commitment of partners to maintain project resources; the website (HMU), the course (ATHENA European University through its partners IPP, HMU, UM and USIEGEN), the Dictionary (IPP, Informatics Department from the School of Engineering), The Studio and Gloss Loader (Medidata). The articulation of all these outcomes forms an holistic TechWhiz ecosystem, a core outcome of the project that sets a sound foundation for the continuation of TechWhiz.