Sign Language Translation: A Survey of Approaches and Techniques

Sign language is the main communication way for deaf and hard-of-hearing (i.e., DHH) people, which is unfamiliar to most non-deaf and hard-of-hearing (non-DHH) people. To break down the communication barriers between DHH and non-DHH people and to better promote communication among DHH individuals, we have summarized the research progress on sign language translation. We provide the necessary background on sign language translation and introduce its four subtasks (i.e., sign2gloss2text, sign2text, sign2(gloss+text), and gloss2text). We distill the basic mode of sign language translation (SLT) and introduce the transformer-based framework of SLT. We analyze the main challenges of SLT and propose possible directions for its development.