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Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language

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Re: Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language

#31

Post by smegsicle »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #22
smegsicle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the part where it says "the word order is strange" is implying that they don't know how to read properly

That is because American Sign Language has a different sentence structure and grammar from English. It's a rather understandable result of a person being raised to communicate in one language "verbally" and a different language to communicate in text. To give one example, ASL puts negation and inquisition at the end of sentences. If I want to ask, "What is this?" in ASL I would point to the thing I am curious about a…

i acknowledge that ASL is different from english, but i refuse to believe that deaf people can't read

Re: Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language

#32

Post by duskwuff »

mcdonje wrote: post #24

>You are excluding more than 700 million people from your content. I'm sorry, but that is not a believable stat. You mean to tell me close to 1/10 of the planet is deaf and speaks ASL and doesn't read a written language? I'm all for the project. I'm 100% in favor of increasing accessibility. I just don't believe that stat. Are you sure it isn't 700k? That'd be more reasonable considering Wikipedia says a 1972 survey…

Even 700k would be ridiculous; it implies that not only has the ASL population roughly doubled in the last 50 years, but also that that population is entirely incapable of reading written English. That's clearly not true.

700M is simply ludicrous. Even if that's only taken as the number of ASL signers, that would still make ASL the third largest language in the world, ahead of Hindi and Spanish.

Re: Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language

#33

Post by dangus »

mcdonje wrote: post #24

>You are excluding more than 700 million people from your content. I'm sorry, but that is not a believable stat. You mean to tell me close to 1/10 of the planet is deaf and speaks ASL and doesn't read a written language? I'm all for the project. I'm 100% in favor of increasing accessibility. I just don't believe that stat. Are you sure it isn't 700k? That'd be more reasonable considering Wikipedia says a 1972 survey…

There aren’t even 700 million people in the entire world who have any form of hearing loss.

The rate is 5%.

OP should clean up that marketing pitch. I think it’s a good service that doesn’t have to be sold by shaming the potential customer.

Source: https://disabilitease.com/percentage-world-deaf/

Re: Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language

#34

Post by lupire »

endisneigh wrote: post #13

What's surprising about this to me is that ASL has no written form. I found si5s but it doesn't seem incredibly mainstream. I'm curious how people who speak primarily with ASL interact on the internet. How do people who speak with ASL communicate over long distances without video, if not text? An AMA would be appreciated. An interesting idea would be processing subtitles to some sort of digital mannequin that makes a…

Text and spoken language are extremely linear.

Visual and sign language are extremely spatial, like in Arrival / Story of Your Life. ASL is not signed one word at a time.

Automated translation is difficult, because ASL is not Signed English, it doesn't translate word for word.

Deaf people can (and usually do) learn to read and write the local language.

Re: Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language

#35

Post by lupire »

codyogden wrote: post #11
Things4People wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many deaf people have poor grammar because American Sign Language (ASL) greatly simplifies and, in some cases, omits things that are not really needed to convey an idea. To a deaf person subtitles are is overly verbose and the word order is strange (for example, subtitles has "running," which is the word "run" followed by a sign for "ing." ASL does away with "ing" because it is obvious in context).

Uh, no. Sign languages, like American Sign Language, are not "simplistic" versions of spoken languages. They are complete, complex languages with their own robust syntax and grammatical structures. A better way to explain this is that it's like an adult who is natively fluent in one language trying to read subtitles in a second language with which they don't have working fluency and rarely, if ever, speak. Source: My…

Sign language is more like watching a movie than listening to radio. It's extremely spatial, with space around the body used to indicate grammatical elements and their relation to each other.

Spoken languages are far more similar to each other than to sign languages.

Subtitles are like watching a movie with the green screen instead of the scenery filled in.

Re: Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language

#36

Post by klyrs »

endisneigh wrote: post #13

What's surprising about this to me is that ASL has no written form. I found si5s but it doesn't seem incredibly mainstream. I'm curious how people who speak primarily with ASL interact on the internet. How do people who speak with ASL communicate over long distances without video, if not text? An AMA would be appreciated. An interesting idea would be processing subtitles to some sort of digital mannequin that makes a…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_relay_service

Deaf people were using video to communicate over long distances way before most of us were even aware that was possible. A lot of thought and engineering went into these systems, to make them responsive enough for real time communication. Unfortunately, that technology is being phased out in favor of inferior tech that works over IP. Due to the nature of the protocol, it's quite bad for real time communication -- hearing people are generally satisfied with Zoom because they're using it for audio and a low quality / high latency video feed is tolerable.

Re: Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language

#37

Post by lupire »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #12
MikusR wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So deaf people can't read books?

Some of the best technical writers I've met were classmates from the NTID, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology. But I think it was that english was in some ways a "foreign" language that made them so good; They went out of their way to be clear to the point of verbose, probably because it was unnatural and they felt it. I don't want to sound judgemental, but I learned a…

Hearing people have no concept of personal distance :-) They will yell at you from across a room!

Re: Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language

#38

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

smegsicle wrote: post #31
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is because American Sign Language has a different sentence structure and grammar from English. It's a rather understandable result of a person being raised to communicate in one language "verbally" and a different language to communicate in text. To give one example, ASL puts negation and inquisition at the end of sentences. If I want to ask, "What is this?" in ASL I would point to the thing I am curious about a…

i acknowledge that ASL is different from english, but i refuse to believe that deaf people can't read

A Deaf person reading English and thinking that "the word order is strange" is what I am talking about and it's explained by the differences between ASL and English. I did not mean to imply that Deaf people can't read.

Re: Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language

#39

Post by smeej »

einherjae wrote: post #9
MikusR wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So deaf people can't read books?

It’s more that English isn’t necessarily their native language, at least if born deaf. ASL is not signed English, it’s roots are French, and as far as I understand that wouldn’t make French their native language either. ASL is their native language, and it has no written form (afaik).

Well and French Sign Language is very different from ASL.

I had a friend who grew up a hearing child of Deaf parents, with two hearing older siblings, so he learned ASL and (American) English in tandem.

By the time I knew him, he also spoke French and French Sign Language because he'd been living in France for several years, and he had fun explaining and showing us some of the differences with his Deaf French friends.

Re: Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language

#40

Post by shric »

mcdonje wrote: post #24

>You are excluding more than 700 million people from your content. I'm sorry, but that is not a believable stat. You mean to tell me close to 1/10 of the planet is deaf and speaks ASL and doesn't read a written language? I'm all for the project. I'm 100% in favor of increasing accessibility. I just don't believe that stat. Are you sure it isn't 700k? That'd be more reasonable considering Wikipedia says a 1972 survey…

I think it's an error and they meant 70 million.

https://earthweb.com/sign-language-users/

"Roughly 70 million hearing-impaired and deaf people all over the globe use sign language to communicate."

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