Teckentranskription

This repository contains four separate projects, all centered around the Swedish Sign Language and its transcription system:

• A lexicon
• An intro to the transcription system
• A transcription tool
• The FreeSans-SWL typeface

Lexicon

The lexicon aims to do two things above and beyond what the official lexicon currently provides, namely:

• It’s FAST! – Searches are performed locally, which means that (after the initial page load) nothing needs to be transmitted over the network, and the only limiting factor for search speed is the speed of your own computer. – Even if you perform a search which displays all the words in the lexicon you’ll see the results immediately. (Videos and thumbnails are still loaded over the network, however.)

• It’s transcription centered – Search for a sign language transcription (whole or partial) is just as easy as to search for a Swedish translation. This means you can find signs you have only seen performed, and don’t have a translation for. (There’s an on-screen keyboard for entering transcription symbols, and you can, of course, also copy/paste transcriptions for searching, or inclusion in other texts.)

The lexicon is slowly maturing, but it still doesn’t show all the information that is available in the official lexicon. However, each search result also contain a link to the article in the official lexicon – so you can easily find their material as well (like sign categories, longer descriptions of the signs and example sentence videos).

In the future we hope sort matches by relevance to your search, add categories (for dialects, unusual signs, or different usage categories like ’numbers’, ’cooking’ etc) and allow for fuzzier searches (by automatically searching for synonyms and spellchecking your query).

Fresh data is (automatically) imported every week from the official Swedish Sign Language Lexicon. The exact date of the latest import is can be seen on the dictionary page.

Intro to the Transcription System

This is an article which aims to explain all the intricacies of the transcription system in an exhaustive, yet straightforward, way. It also contains a detailed history of the symbols, describing when the usage of each symbol began, and (in relevant cases) ended.

Transcription Tool

This is a tool to aid you in writing Swedish Sign Language transcription which doesn’t require you to install any special software. It is very similar to the on-screen keyboard in the lexicon, and for smaller transcriptions you might actually prefer to use the lexicon (for both editing and sharing), however, the transcription tool is better suitable for longer texts, or when you want to share a transcription without necessarily also sharing a lexicon search result.

Use the transcription tool to:

• Write transcriptions – Just as with the lexicon, use your computer’s keyboard to input text and the on-screen keyboard to write transcription symbols. You can also use copy/paste to move the results back and forth between your favourite word processor and the transcription tool. (To get the transcription symbols to work in your favourite word processor, just install the transcription font.)

• Share transcriptions with other people – Use the ’Share…’ button to create a link to your transcription. Unfortunately there is no way to reliably display a transcription in an email (it works in some email programs, but not most of them) but sending a link to a transcript might be the next best thing when communicating with your colleagues.

FreeSans-SWL Typeface

All of the above projects make use of the FreeSans-SWL font. The font is a version of GNU FreeSans (from the GNU FreeFont family), extended to include the symbols used by the Swedish Sign Language transcription system (the transcription system used by the official Swedish Sign Language Lexicon).

This is a high quality sans-serif typeface, suitable for text in any language supported by Unicode, as well as transcriptions of Swedish Sign Language – the intent is to provide one typeface which can be used for an entire article, both for the main text and transcriptions.

(SWL is the ISO code for Swedish Sign Language.)

Installing

If you’re only using the tools described on this page, you won’t need to install the font on your computer, but if you want to use sign language transcriptions in your own documents (article, thesis, web page, etc) – the easiest way to do that is to install FreeSans-SWL. It is a TrueType font which works well on MacOS, Windows and Linux.

Download the FreeSans-SWL TrueType font, then click on it to open the file. – On most computers this will result in the computer asking whether or not you want to install the font in question.

Thereafter, use the transcription tool to write the transcriptions you need and copy/paste them into your document. Or copy/paste whatever you need straight from the lexicon.

Technical Info

The font uses Unicode’s Supplementary Private Use Area-B, specifically the codepoints between U+10c900 and U+10c9ff.

An attempt was made to register this writing system with the Under-ConScript Unicode Registry (UCSUR) in October 2017, but the request was denied by UCSUR with the suggestion it should be registered with the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC).