Authors: Miss. Urvi Pawar, Miss. Shreya Rakibe, Miss. Vaishnavi Sandhan, Miss. Samruddhi Vispute, Assistant Professor Dr. Kirti Patil
Abstract: Communicating with Deaf or hard-of- hearing people can be difficult at times and the chal- lenges are great in multilingual countries such as India. This study describes current work on this but offers a proposal for an animated ISL (Indian Sign Language) translation system from Marathi text and/or speech – based on the fact that there are many more English- MSL (Marathi Sign Language) resources available and, therefore, a ’significant access gap’ when considering Deaf users within our target country. The majority of currently available translation systems have been based upon machine learning; however, due to insuffi- cient parallel corpora/annotated sign data resources for Marathi-MSL, this method will not work. The proposed system adopts as an alternative a ’rule based’ method- ology which will map the Marathi language & grammar structures onto ISL using linguistic ’rules’ and dictio- nary and will develop this through web application using React.jsTailwindCSSFlask for the front end of the web application, while allowing use of ’browser based’ storage thus ensuring a very lightweight deployment. Given that ISL requires ’gestures’, ’facial expressions’ and ’spatial syntax’, it is not possible to translate word for word; rather, the system will also consider some important Marathi grammatical elements, e.g. inflection; location/post position, verb forms, sentence structure and will therefore generate an ISL output that more accurately represents the original Marathi and promotes communication and accessibility for Deaf individuals.
