Exploring Localization for Mouthings in Sign Language Avatars

According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), localization is “the adaptation of a product, application or document content to meet the language, cultural and other requirements of a specific target market” (Ishida & Miller, 2015). One aspect of localizing a sign language avatar is creating a capability to produce convincing mouthing. For purposes of this inquiry we make a distinction between mouthings and mouth gesture (Crasborn et al., 2008). The term ‘mouthings’ refers to mouth movements derived from words of a spoken language while ‘mouth gesture’ refers to mouth movements not derived from a spoken language. This paper reports on a first step to identify the requirements for an avatar to be capable of mouthings in multiple signed languages.