Corela (Dec 2021)
Représenter les langues des signes sous forme écrite : questions qui ont besoin (encore aujourd’hui) d’être posées
Abstract
Sign Languages (SLs) are languages which do not have a writing system of their own and which, by their visual-gestural nature, cannot be written phonographically. The consequences of this "unscriptability" are at the center of the work of Elena Antinoro Pizzuto (EAP), carried out from 2000. EAP, who died in 2011, highlighted the biases that glosses, used as substitutes for transcription, induce in the linguistic analysis of SLs. Over the past 10 years, technological and methodological advances have made it easier to automatically enter data from the body (thanks to motion capture), to annotate multilinearly multimodal corpora and to maintain the links between annotations and videos (thanks to software such as ELAN), as well as to distribute videos on which the analyses are based (thanks to F.A.I.R. principles). However, these technologies and good practices — although fundamental — do not act as a transcription system: they are solutions that eliminate some of the symptoms linked to SLs unscriptability, but do not make up for the lack of a system of graphic representation for these languages. Therefore, the questions raised by EAP are still relevant today. While various attempts to transcribe SLs have emerged, their use to exploit large corpora of SLs has often been hindered by their poor readability and/or queryability. By comparing the pros and cons of these systems, it is possible to draw up a list of characteristics that a transcription system for SLs (and for co verbal gestures too) should have. Nevertheless, developing a system that brings together all these specificities is a challenge that linguists cannot meet alone: it is in multidisciplinarity, and particularly in working jointly with specialists in the graphic aspects of writing, that the solution lies. In fact, the GestualScript team has employed this "grapholinguistic" approach to develop Typannot, a typographic transcription system for SLs and co-verbal gestures.
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