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Show HN: Subtitles are not the same as sign language
Hello HN,
get your videos translated into sign language quickly and easily by uploading them and choosing your favorite language.
After 48 hours you will get your final video.
That's it.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Thanks a lot!
- Robtech23 4y agoThis looks like a good idea. What is the difference between sign language and subtitles?
- Things4People 4y agoMany 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).
- MikusR 4y agoSo deaf people can't read books?
- chaps 4y ago....what? How do you read what they wrote and come up with that question?
- smegsicle 4y agothe part where it says "the word order is strange" is implying that they don't know how to read properly
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y agoThat 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 and then sign, "What?"
- smegsicle 4y agoi acknowledge that ASL is different from english, but i refuse to believe that deaf people can't read
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y agoA 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chaps 4y agoI'm sorry but, I don't know how it's possible to read that and interpret it to imply that deaf people can't read. It's a strange question to ask. Maybe it's the word order that throws them off.
- Kiro 4y agoRead the other replies to the question and educate yourself.
- chaps 4y agoNot sure why you feel the need to respond with that sort of hasty, passive aggressive suggestion. The way I read their comments is that it's akin to hearing that someone learned Spanish (which has different ordering than english) as their first language and asking, "So you can't read a book?". It comes off as wildly naive, with a flavor of offensiveness that you seem to be accusing me of.
- Kiro 4y agoLearning to read is a lot harder for deaf people, yes. For deaf people sign language is their native language, not the spoken equivalent, so imagine speaking one language and having to learn to read another.
- kube-system 4y agoMany deaf people can read. But, people often find it easier to communicate in their first language. ASL is not English, it's a different language.
- einherjae 4y agoIt’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).
- smeej 4y agoWell 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.
- GauntletWizard 4y agoSome 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 little bit of sign language at the time, and the conversations I and friends had in sign seemed... Slangy. ASL is a language that has to deal with it's bandwidth limitations and the fact that it's not quite as broadcast as shouting is. Deaf culture involves a lot of physically reaching out and "Grabbing" the audiences attention; Tapping someone on the shoulder is an attention grabber of last resort for the hearing, while it's the obvious and only way of grabbing the attention of someone who's looking the other direction to the Deaf. Perhaps for that reason I always felt like Deaf people had no concept of personal space (Though my personal intuition is that it's actually literally about the little sounds your movement makes - I've encountered the same lack of personal space at Gun Ranges, where everyone is wearing hearing protection and you'd think that people would want to be separated)
- watersb 4y agoI think this is a good question, because I had always thought of American Sign Language (ASL) as a transcription of English. But I learned that ASL is a language all of its own, grammar and syntax are not always the same. In college, I learned a bit of a sign language- "C Sign" - that is actually an adaptation of English. At the time, C Sign was the thing that hearing, native English speakers were taught as a way to interact with non-hearing ASL signers. That was thirty years ago, so things might well be different now. I don't have any direct experience, but some of my extended family are native speakers of Apache or Navajo. These are different languages, but "mutually intelligible" - speaking one can be understood if you know the other. And I traveled in Finland and Estonia - mutually intelligible (utterly impossible for me to use either of them). I think C Sign might be more of a "pidgin": a simplification of English and ESL that is not used natively, but can be used to communicate. So, yeah -- it's not wrong to wonder if ASL signers are using English, or are able to read it. I believe the answers to these questions are "not really" and "yes, fluently". (Perhaps the question was posed in a blunt manner. But that's written, online communication for you -- it's an approximation of spoken interaction, and often lacking in body language or tone. So it's often taken in a way that wasn't exactly the intention... :-) Yay, Language!)
- codyogden 4y agoUh, 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 degree in American Sign Language.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y agoTo expand on this, it's commonly believed that sign languages are simplified versions of the local spoken language. Indeed, it wasn't until ~1960[0] that these languages were seriously studied as "real" languages. At least part of the reason a Deaf person might have poor grammar in a spoken language is because said spoken language is almost always at least their second language. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stokoe#Sign_language_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stokoe#Sign_language_r...
- lupire 4y agoSign 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.
- lupire 4y agoHow could you have made the website and not understand what sign language is?
- klyrs 4y agoYour description of ASL here is a red flag. Temporal aspect and grammar are not encoded in specific signs, and the sentence structure is derived from French. I can read some truths into your words here, but it's a damn stretch. As a hearing person with knowledge of the language and friends in the community, you sound like an barely-informed hearing person with a capitalist-savior complex. If that isn't you, be transparent about who you are and why you're in the business.
- sophacles 4y agoSubtitles (like sms or twitter) don't convey tone very well, so in a classic voice over just having the subtitles makes it hard to convey things like sarcasm or innuendo or emphasis or emotion. Sign language has ways to convey all of this. Think about this sentence: That's cool. It's one of those sentences that exists only to convey a tone. Depending on tone it can mean: * that is in fact cool * that is in fact NOT cool * i acknowledge that you have said something * i agree to your suggestion and plenty more in contexts where you only know which it means because you can hear the tone of the person.
- klyrs 4y agoSounds too good to be true, you don't mention cost anywhere. You can't scale this without paying interpreters. I dare say, you won't have a 48-hour turnaround on movie-length content either, without a low bar for quality.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- endisneigh 4y agoWhat'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 all of the gestures. I imagine you'd do this by coding all of the sign and finding all of the appropriate mappings, a la translation.
- smegsicle 4y agonot to mention that watching a video with subtitles means glancing at the text when a new line comes up, while watching a video with a signing translator means having to glance at the signer for every single word, right?
- ksaj 4y agoA person who signs regularly can do reasonably well from the "corner of the eye" because they speak / sign in groups all the time. Reading text is not anywhere near as efficient, in terms of understanding while watching other activities going on at the same time. Also, because it isn't Signed English (which is actually a thing) there is a specific grammar to it that makes it super efficient. That's why it often looks like the signer on political broadcasts isn't telling the whole story, when in fact they might even be telling more of it than text alone could convey. I have a number of deaf friends and acquaintances (I'm almost deaf in one ear, and HoH in the other, so I have hearing aids), and I know at least from them, that written English is not their forte. A lot of grammar, like adding "ing" to the end of verbs and gerunds, is pretty baffling to someone who hasn't grown up hearing them in speech. Since I actually can hear (just not very well), my spoken/written English is not affected.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Jarwain 4y agoASL is usually "spoken" by the deaf or hard-of-hearing right? For the most part I imagine text would satisfy most cases. This product's offering seems to be focused on how ASL can deliver on pitch/tone/emphasis/emotion in a way transcription currently doesn't, thus "subtitles aren't sign languahe"
- frankfrank13 4y agoso funny that emojis + black text have become the new norm in logo design. Cool product though. Would love to see even more accessibility-as-a-service type things. When I was in college I watched a visually-impaired friend try to use Ableton (at the time one of the only DAW's with a screen reader) and it was predictably painful.
- mcdonje 4y ago>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 estimated the signing population as between 250k and 500k.
- duskwuff 4y agoEven 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.
- dangus 4y agoThere 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/ https://disabilitease.com/percentage-world-deaf/
- duskwuff 4y ago> The rate is 5%. And they don't all use ASL, either. Not all deaf people rely on sign language, especially if they became deaf later in life, and there are numerous other sign languages used outside the US which aren't mutually intelligible with ASL.
- Things4People 4y ago> Thanks for your source. I will update the number!
- shric 4y agoI think it's an error and they meant 70 million. https://earthweb.com/sign-language-users/ https://earthweb.com/sign-language-users/ "Roughly 70 million hearing-impaired and deaf people all over the globe use sign language to communicate."
- samatman 4y agoWhich 700 million people are going to benefit from ASL signs for a video? This is a preposterous claim.
- smegsicle 4y ago> [if you don't use our product] You are excluding more than 700 million people from your content i assume this is coming from a place where all abilities and disabilities are equal and any kind of value judgement is immoral, so maybe you could find it useful to know that in the real world, 700 million deaf people might find it offensive that you assume they are illiterate
- JadeNB 4y ago> 700 million deaf people might find it offensive that you assume they are illiterate You don't have to be illiterate to prefer subtitles in your native language, which, for many ASL speakers, is ASL, not English.
- legitster 4y agoA neat service. But from their site: > NO emotions > NO accent > NO gestures > NO native language This is largely counterproductive. If you are watching something visual, all of the emotions and gestures you need are already there in the video or the original presenter. The only niche this could fill are narration-driven documentaries. With subtitles you can also do things like spell-check them or suggest edits. If a third party service sends back poor quality signing, it seems like quality control would be just as much work if not more than doing the signing yourself.
- orlando_jeff 4y agoSeems like a good service. Will be interesting to see if the 48h turnaround time will be manageable with good quality and at an affordable rate. If yes - that'd be very interesting.