Transcriber: Tonia David Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic
(Applause)
How many different sign languages [are there] in the world?
Just one? Is sign language universal?
A couple?
Are they different in each continent?
There are at least 126 sign languages in the world.
Technically, each country has their own sign language.
British Sign Language and American Sign Language are completely different,
even both speak English.
How many people use sign language?
People may think sign language is a minor language,
but sign language is the 4th largest language in the States, next to Chinese.
Sign language is not a tool for communication between deaf people and hearing people.
Each sign language has their own grammar, words and a question.
But, when I talk about sign language,
I hear a same phrase a lot of time.
Hey, sign language is not universal? Why not? It's just for the gestures.
It's got to be nice that the people can talk to anybody in the world without any interpretation.
That will be fantastic.
OK, I understand what they want to say.
But, even verbal language does not have universal language.
Why could sign language?
A lot of people learn English all over the world,
but still English is not our universal language.
A lot of people use Chinese in their daily lives.
What about Esperanto?
Why don't we have universal language?
People may consider pronunciation and accent.
It could be true, but cultural difference and histories are more important.
For example, cheating. Like to cheat someone or [betray].
In American sign language, cheating is like this.
What is this?
This is a wall and the person is hiding from someone, so this is a "spy".
What about Japanese sign language?
What is this?
This is a fox.
In Japanese old stories, a fox is a typical animal which cheats people.
They changed themselves into humans and stole something from people.
A spy cheats people in America and a fox cheats people in Japan.
Is this pronunciation? It's a cultural difference.
Now you can start to begin [to see]
that it's going to be really hard to make sign language universal.
Sign language is linguistically a language.
There are a lot of native signers, whose mother tongues are sign language.
They think, dream and live in sign language.
Now let's talk about myself a little bit.
I personally don't have any deaf people in my family.
And also, I did not have any deaf friends, until I started learning sign language.
But, when I saw the sign language [for the] first time, I just fell in love,
because sign language is such a beautiful language.
So I started to learn sign language when I was 20 years old,
which is 5 years ago.
So when you, when people learn any language, you need dictionaries.
Most Japanese people learn English.
So we have a Japanese to English dictionary and an English to Japanese dictionary.
We need both.
What about the case with sign language?
We have a Japanese to Japanese sign language dictionary
and an English to American sign language dictionary,
but we don't have a Japanese sign language to Japanese dictionary
[or] an American sign language to English dictionary.
When you saw me use sign language at the beginning of this presentation,
you [had] no idea what I said.
Then - how do you search [for] those signs?
SLinto is the place you can find the world's first sign language keyboard.
You can type the key for the fingers and the place of your hands,
then you can search the words in sign language.
Finally, you can get the meaning in your language.
SLinto is not only for Japanese [people] and Americans,
this platform can be used [for] all sign languages in the world.
This is a crowdsourced dictionary,
so you can join us to create this dictionary.
You can just take a video of sign language, and upload - like YouTube,
edit - like Wikipedia and share - like Facebook.
Today is the first day of a totally new type of dictionary in history.
Tech for the Deaf. Thank you.
(Applause)