An Approach to Machine Translation from Japanese Text to JSL Text

Abstract

In this paper we present an approach to machine translation from Japanese to JSL (Japanese Sign Language).There is no standard way of writing JSL, and thatbrings complexity and difficulty on natural language processing for JSL.We defineda Japanese gloss-based notation system for JSL.This notation system enables usto divide the MT process into two stages, namely, the text-to-text translation stage (Japanese to JSL text) and text-to-motion synthesis stage (JSL text to JSL motion).Our current focus is on the former stage.This notation also allows us to apply theexisting MT techniques to JSL.We implemented a pilot MT system using jaw, apattern transfer-based MT engine that we have been developing to construct MT sys-tems from Japanese to various (oral) languages.To test the validity of our approachand to find the problems of it, we conducted a translation experiment with sentencesextracted from videos for JSL learners.