Fingerspell LSF: Volunteer/Help Wanted

Now that the core of the Flashcards is working reasonably well, my next project will be to install the French LSF (langue de signes français) alphabet.

For me as non-signer it came as quite a surprise to discover that the signing alphabet is not standardized. While there are similarities, the differences can be substantial. Which brings us to the LSF alphabet. (We won't even talk about fingerspelling BSL British Sign Language, which is a two handed alphabet and therefore completely different. Under the heading of surpises, LSF and ASL American Sign Language are said to be quite similar, whereas BSL and ASL are completely different! Who would have thought?)

In any case, I have the pictures to publish the fingerspell flashcards in French. But it seems that it would be more accesible to French signers if the web site and program were also in French. But this exceeds my abilities in French.

So: Help Wanted. Someone to translate 4 web pages into French: the FAQ, the About Us page, the Contact page and the program itself. You can do it from the English or German orginals. All told about 4 to 6 A4 pages. There is no money involved, but you will see my eternal thanks posted on this blog :-)

Please contact me if you can help. Thanks in advance!

German Dictionaries Now Active

I have been working on getting German language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache DGS) support on line. I have now added German German (as opposed to Swiss German) dictionaries so you can practice Sharp-S's ("ß").

The "Easy Dictionary" is list of some 400 popular first names (none of which has a Sharp-S). The "hard" dictionary is a collection of about 2500 German place names. If you are using the Swiss German (DSGS) alphabet, it will display a "ß" as "ss".

The Fingerspell Flashcards may take a while to start, as everything is loaded in advance. Future enhancement: load dictionaries and photos in the background. Be patient, it will come :-). But first I want to do a German language version of the web site.

A special thanks to Jörg Reinholz of fastix.de for making a database of German Places freely available.