Scottish Sign Language Recorded For National Database By Heriot-Watt
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Sign language words and phrases from around Scotland will be recorded by experts from Heriot-Watt University as part of a £1.2m project to produce a database of British Sign Language (BSL) from every part of the UK.

The £1.2m study has just received news of a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. Starting in the new year, Heriot-Watt‘s Centre for Translation & Interpreting Studies in Scotland will be working to create a corpus of BSL in the form of a computerised collection of video-recordings, and to use this to study and understand variation in the vocabulary and grammar of BSL around the UK.

The research team, along with colleagues from University College London, Bristol University, Queen’s University Belfast and Bangor University, will collate BSL data in order to ensure full coverage of the UK. They will be working closely with deaf community members and will film deaf signers including men and women, deaf adults with deaf parents and those with hearing parents, signers who are young and old, and individuals with a variety of social and ethnic backgrounds.

Professor Graham Turner, who holds the Chair of Translation and Interpreting at Heriot-Watt’s School of Management and Languages, said that the aim is to create a valuable resource for current and future research that aims to understand the structure and use of BSL. “It has long been recognised that, just like spoken language, BSL usage varies from place to place around the country. Now, for the first time, advances in technology have made it possible to collect video recordings of sign language that can be stored digitally, given searchable linguistic descriptions and accessed over the internet. Once we and out colleagues around the country have amassed this collection, it will provide a fantastic, flexible and accessible research platform for long-term progress.”

He added that the new information about variation and change in BSL which will result from this project will feed directly into Heriot-Watt’s current Scottish Government-backed Graduate Diploma programme to nurture a new generation of BSL teachers in Scotland, and will in turn bring about improvements to the professional training of sign language interpreters ongoing at Heriot-Watt.

The new project also ties in closely with existing sign language projects within the University’s Department of Languages & Intercultural Studies, including a suite of taught courses ranging from entry-level language skills teaching to an EU-funded initiative with Finnish and German partners to develop a Master’s degree.

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