Development of automatic translation between signed and spoken languages has lagged behind the development of automatic translation between spoken languages, but it is a common misperception that extending machine translation techniques to include signed languages should be a straightforward process. A contributing factor is the lack of an acceptable method for displaying sign language apart from interpreters on video. This position paper examines the challenges of displaying a signed language as a target in automatic translation, analyses the underlying causes and suggests strategies to develop display technologies that are acceptable to sign language communities.

In 2018 the DGS-Korpus project published the first full release of the Public DGS Corpus. This event marked a change of focus for the project. While before most attention had been on increasing the size of the corpus, now an increase in its depth became the priority. New data formats were added, corpus annotation conventions were released and OpenPose pose information was published for all transcripts. The community and research portal websites of the corpus also received upgrades, including persistent identifiers, archival copies of previous releases and improvements to their usability on mobile devices.The research portal was enhanced even further, improving its transcript web viewer, adding a KWIC concordance view, introducing cross-references to other linguistic resources of DGS and making its entire interface available in German in addition to English. This article provides an overview of these changes, chronicling the evolution of the Public DGS Corpus from its first release in 2018, through its second release in 2019 until its third release in 2020.

This paper presents SignHunter, a tool for collecting isolated signs, and discusses application possibilities. SignHunter is successfully used within the DGS-Korpus project to collect name signs for places and cities. The data adds to the content of a German Sign Language (DGS) – German dictionary which is currently being developed, as well as a freely accessible subset of the DGS Corpus, the Public DGS Corpus. We discuss reasons to complement a natural language corpus by eliciting concepts without context and present an application example of SignHunter.

The Public DGS Corpus is published in two different formats, that is subtitled videos for lay persons and lemmatized and annotated transcripts and videos for experts. In addition, a draft version with the first set of preliminary entries of the DGS dictionary (DW-DGS) to be completed in 2023 is now online. The Public DGS Corpus and the DW-DGS are conceived of as stand-alone products, but are nevertheless closely interconnected to offer additional and complementary informative functions. In this paper we focus on linking the published products in order to provide users access to corpus and corpus-based dictionary in various, interrelated ways. We discuss which links are thought to be useful and what challenges the linking of the products poses. In addition we address the inclusion of links to other, older lexical resources (LSP dictionaries).

For publishing sign language corpus data on the web, anonymization is crucial even if it is impossible to hide the visual appearance of the signers: In a small community, even vague references to third persons may be enough to identify those persons. In the case of the DGS Korpus (German Sign Language corpus) project, we want to publish data as a contribution to the cultural heritage of the sign language community while annotation of the data is still ongoing. This poses the question how well anonymization can be achieved given that no full linguistic analysis of the data is available. Basically, we combine analysis of all data that we have, including named entity recognition on translations into German. For this, we use the WebLicht language technology infrastructure. We report on the reliability of these methods in this special context and also illustrate how the anonymization of the video data is technically achieved in order to minimally disturb the viewer.