Preparation of an Islamic Parallel Bilingual Corpus for Deaf People with 3D Animations

Abstract

An Initial Islamic bilingual parallel corpus of Arabic and Sign language was developed in a previous research we carried out at Al-Imam University, Saudi Arabia. This corpus is composed of Arabic texts describing the basic Islamic topics such as prayer, pilgrimage, fasting, etc. in terms of elements and “functioning”. In this paper, we present our work related to the refinement and enhancement of this corpus and its structure; we present also a prototype of a teaching and learning environment that we will continuously improve to reach a good educational support for deaf. This environment will be powered by a hybrid (rule-based and statistical approaches) translation component combined with avatar-based 3D animations, which are currently under development.