Kenyan Sign Language digital glossary for Peace Corps Kenya
Imagine a widely used language, with no available dictionary. Now imagine that this language cannot be written down, as it is entirely visual. How can you create a glossary for someone learning a language that cannot be written, and has no sound? If you want to know, and help create this unique resource, keep reading.
Background
In 2009, the United States Peace Corps in Kenya began work on a project to improve language learning for Deaf Education Volunteers, who will be communicating primarily in Kenyan Sign Language (KSL). Early on, the project consisted of written materials and drawings of all the signs. These materials were used extensively for trainings. A group of volunteers eventually began collecting pictures and videos of signs, however they were not uniform, some were difficult to see, and the signs for the same word varied substantially from region to region.
Another huge problem that was observed was the "cooking" or "inventing" of signs for words the volunteers didn't know. Just like you would not "invent" a Chinese word because you do not know the language, it is not the place of an American volunteer to have an influence on a native Kenyan language.
To eradicate this problem, Peace Corps Volunteer Leaders Rachel Rose and Peter Hess started taking the project in a different direction. Rachel worked with a team of deaf community members, with the assistance of our sign language training staff, to have members of the community agree on particular signs. They then began the painstaking task of filming over 500 technical signs, focusing on Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Math, once the sign had been agreed upon by members of the deaf community. However, in certain cases more than one sign was deemed appropriate for a word, so there are “sign variations” which can be thought of as “regional dialects.”
After the signs were collected, Peter began creating an offline website, written in HTML. The idea was that the content could be loaded on flash drives, and given to volunteers to use at their sites and schools where internet access is often limited. Eventually, the “site” could be hosted in the future, even shared with the deaf community in Kenya. In order to create the offline page, a single HTML page was required for each word, as well as all the letters of the alphabet, a list of all signs, and all the categories. This obviously is a huge amount of work, especially with limited access to electricity, and coding ability. That is why we need your help!
Project Goals
What we are looking for is both an easy to navigate front facing “site”, preferably one that can both be hosted online, as well as passed along to volunteers for offline access. We also need a backend, that allows us to easily update content, create new signs, and have an entirely searchable and taggable database of the signs. We also want to be able to define the signs in both English and Swahili. This would allow us to expand the project in the future to include general signs, medical related signs, malaria and HIV/AIDS related signs, etc… For now, we would like the backend to be “closed” so that only authorized users would have access to it. We are also open to the idea of social integration, and to possibly “gameify” the entire content, so that volunteers could interact with it, and use it as a training and learning tool. Having a discussion board, or a way that we could incorporate the deaf community in selection of signs, to simplify the sign selection process would be great, but is not essential in the early states.
Needs
- An easy way to add and manage content by authorized users
- A “pretty” user-interface, that the Volunteers can interact with
- A way to have a “live” version of the content, as well as an “offline” version for users with limited access to internet/power/both.
Thank you for all your help on this project! With your help, we can immediately implement this new tool, and greatly improve access to a language for our volunteers and for tens of thousands of deaf Kenyans.