ArtAbility News and calendars of accessible arts events in Arizona, including audio-described and American Sign Language interpreted performances. Links to many Arizona arts and disability sites.
Signtel Manufactures the Signtel Interpreter, which translates speech and text into American Sign Language.
Wikipedia Links
American Sign Language American Sign Language is the dominant sign language in the United States, English-speaking Canada and parts of Mexico. American Sign Language is usually abbreviated ASL. Although it has also been known as Ameslan or Amslan, these abbreviations are not generally used and are considered obsolete. As with other sign languages, or more properly, visual-gestural-spatial languages, its grammar and syntax are separate and distinct from the spoken language(s) in its area of influence. There has been no reliable survey of the number of people who use ASL as their primary language; estimates range from 200,000 to 2 million (http://library.gallaudet.edu/dr/faq-asl-rank.html).
Interpreted Language In computer programming, an interpreted language is a programming language whose programs may be executed from source form, by an interpreter. Any language may, in theory, be compiled or interpreted; therefore, this designation refers to languages' implementations rather than designs. In fact, many languages have both compilers and interpreters, including C, BASIC, and Python.
Language Interpretation Language intepretation may be roughly understood as the restating, in speech, language spoken (uttered out loud) in another language. Interpreters typically distinguish interpretation from translation, which deals with the written word. Interpretations are uttered; translations are written down.
Sign Language A sign language (also 'signed language') is a language which uses manual communication instead of sound to convey meaning - simultaneously combining handshapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express a speaker's thoughts. Sign languages develop in deaf communities, which can include interpreters and friends and families of deaf people as well as people who are deaf or hearing-impaired themselves.
British Sign Language British sign language (BSL) is the sign language used in the United Kingdom (UK). BSL is the first or preferred language of nearly 70,000 deaf or hearing-impaired people in the UK. It is a language of space and movement using the hands, body, face and head. Many thousands of hearing people also use BSL.
Native American Languages Native American languages are the indigenous languages of the Americas, spoken by Native Americans from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America. The Native American languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language isolates. Many proposals to group these into higher-level families have been made by some linguists, but several of these have not been generally accepted.
Taiwanese Sign Language Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL) is the sign language most commonly used in Taiwan. It is the native language of some 50,000 people in the nation. Serious linguistic research on TSL began in the 1970s and is continuing at present. The first International Symposium on Taiwan Sign Language Linguistics was held on March 1-2, 2003, at Chung Cheng University in Minhsiung, Chiayi Co., Taiwan.
Sign Language Glove A sign language glove is a sophisticated electronic device which converts the complex motions of a sign language into written or spoken words.
A young inventor on a Fulbright scholarship announced a working model in 2003, and the US Army is also developing a battlefield model.
Nicaraguan Sign Language Nicaraguan Sign Language (or ISN, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua) is a sign language developed in isolation from other sign languages in the 1970s in Nicaragua. It was developed when the Sandinista government created a school for deaf children in Nicaragua (there had previously been no such public institution). The language itself was not developed by the government, but evolved naturally from communication among those deaf students.