Machine Translation

Machine translation is the use of computer software to automatically translate text or speech from one language to another. In accessibility contexts, machine translation is particularly relevant to sign language accessibility, where translating written or spoken text into sign language via animated avatars requires the same linguistic sophistication as any cross-linguistic translation system. Natural sign languages like BSL and ASL have fundamentally different grammars from spoken languages — including spatial reference, classifier constructions, topic-comment structure, and simultaneous multi-channel expression — making text-to-sign translation a significantly harder problem than translating between two spoken languages. Intermediate representations such as Discourse Representation Structures have been used to bridge the structural gap between source text and target sign language. Machine translation also applies to multilingual web content accessibility, enabling users with disabilities to access content in their preferred language.