Bridging the gap: Thai - Thai Sign Machine Translation

We propose a multi-phase approach, Thai-Thai Sign Machine Translation (TTSMT), to translate Thai text into Thai Sign language. Thai Sign language is the language of the deaf in Thailand. TTSMT begins the translation process by segmenting the input sentence since Thai is a non-word boundary language, converting the segmented sentence into simple sentence forms since most Thai Sign are expressed in a sequence of such form, and then generating the intermediate sign codes which link a Thai word to its corresponding Thai Sign. The most appropriate sign codes will be selected and rearranged in the spatial grammatical order for generating the Sign language with pictures. The distinction between the Thai text and Thai Sign Language in both grammar and vocabulary are concerned in each processing step to ensure the accuracy of translation. We have developed the Thai-Thai Sign translation system based on TTSMT. The developed system was implemented and tested to translate Thai sentences used in everyday life. The test results have proved that TTSMT can provide accurate translations.