Sign language transcription conventions for the ECHO Project

The main goal of the case study ‘a comparative study of European sign languages’ is to create a database with comparable multi-media recordings documenting sign languages as used in three European countries (Sweden, UK, and the Netherlands). This study should be regarded as a demonstration of how multi-media data can be documented and used on the internet to make them accessible for the whole scientific community, for deaf people themselves or for anyone interested in sign languages. These publicly available data collections are expected to contribute significantly to the systematic study of individual languages, but also the study of the similarities and differences between languages. This new technology for presenting sign language data and transcriptions poses the following question: to what extent should we use standard transcription conventions? If all the raw material (the video sources) is available, do we need full transcriptions? In principle, one can look at the video source for all kinds of information that are traditionally included in various transcription system, such as eye gaze, head nods, etc. On the other hand, the great strength of computer tools such as ELAN is that it allows for complex searches in large data domains and for the immediate inspection of the video fragments relating to the search results; this is typically very timeconsuming when using paper transcription forms or even computerized transcription forms that are not directly linked to the original data. We wanted to establish an annotation system that could be useful for any researcher, with a focus on the syntactic and discourse domains. We tried to be careful not to impose too much analysis on any tier by saying that a specific phonetic form is an instance of ‘person agreement’, for example. The relatively small set of transcription tiers allows for the coding of a large data set, which can be further expanded by researchers according to their specific needs. ELAN will see many updates in the coming year (2004); one of the future functions will be the possibility to expand a publicly available transcription file with ones own additions, including extra tiers, and storing these additions in a local file while maintaining the link to the original transcription that will be stored on a remote server.