Nowadays, English has become a universal language. It goes over borderlines between countries. We, Japanese are studying English to catch up with this trend with knowing that we are behind other countries. On the other hand, not much attention is paid to the fact that we are leaving behind deaf people, one of them is my father.

My father Takashi was a reticent engineer. He was diligent and devoted to his work. At the age of 55, he broke down with exhaustion and was hospitalized. He was diagnosed as sudden hearing loss with stress, and has lost a sound for good. A while after he left the hospital, he tried to learn sigh language. Soon, however, he gave up because he is not only old but also lack of tool to learn sign language.

We have Japanese-English dictionary and English-Japanese dictionary. We also have Japanese to Japanese sign language dictionary but not Japanese sign language to Japanese dictionary. Neither does American sign language to English, even though sign language is the fourth largest language in the U.S. For instance, when we need to find a sign for the word “dog”, we can do a search with keywords like “sign language, dog,” which will give pictures or video clips providing the sign for the word. On the other hand, if we would like to know the meaning from a sign, there’s no easy way to look it up. We have to ask a sign language speaker with describing the sign; “the sign where you hold your right thumb up and touch the left ring finger…”. This kind of process gives a lot of workload to deaf people, especially my father as he is unsociable.

Meanwhile, I found a startup addressing some communication problems among deaf people and produce a TV program featuring the entrepreneur. His main business is a remote call center which translates deaf people’s sign language to spoken language and vice versa, so that they can communicate with shop staffs, city hole officials and so on. Now, it is developing a new service named SLinto, which is the world’s first crowd-sourced online dictionary for sign language. It has “sign language keyboard”, which consists of four main components for a sign; location, handshape, orientation, and movement. Marking each component results in narrowing down a few videos which can correspond, and user can find the exact one. This system helps deaf people to find a meaning from a word.

SLinto may play another big role to help deaf people communicate with others from different countries with producing one universal sign language. In general, each country has their own sign languages stemming from cultural background, with ending up with more than 100 sign languages in the world. In the U.S., the sign for cheating comes from “spy” describing a person hiding behind a wall. On the other hand, Japanese sign language uses “fox” as it is a typical animal which cheats people in Japanese old stories. Technically, anyone can create their own signs, and a sign more people use become a standard sign. Thus, crowd-sourced online dictionary scheme works to produce one universal sign language. Anyone can upload sign language video to SLinto, and users all over the world can rate the signs so that useful expressions will be listed higher in the search result converging into one universal sign language.

This crowd-sourced online dictionary contributes to inclusive society with facilitating communication between deaf people and the others including people living in different countries.