General-purpose machine translation for sign language

Develop effective machine-translation methods between spoken oral languages and sign languages, addressing the unresolved linguistic and computational difficulties that prevent reliable translation for general communication.

Background

The report explains that machine translation is already difficult for oral languages despite extensive study and formal description. Sign languages present additional challenges because their grammatical structures differ substantially from oral languages and remain comparatively poorly described.

Although the report identifies formal representation systems and restricted alternatives such as signed French or formulaic language, it does not resolve general-purpose translation between oral and sign languages.

References

Machine translation between two languages is a difficult problem, still largely unsolved for oral languages, even though they have been studied for a long time and are well described. Sign language has the additional difficulties of differing considerably from oral languages and of still being very poorly described.

— Online Sign Language Interpretation System  (2610.07872 - Ponsard et al., 6 Oct 2026) in Section 6.2.4, “Machine Translation”

An interpreter therefore cannot yet be replaced by a machine.

— Online Sign Language Interpretation System  (2610.07872 - Ponsard et al., 6 Oct 2026) in Sections 4.2.4 and 6, “Virtual Interpretation”