ACROSS
A multi-agent AI platform that applies each company's own terminology and style rules to machine translation, cutting costly human post-editing.
Dublin City University
Lead: Dr. Vicent Briva Iglesias
Digital Education & Online CommunicationISL Translate
A machine translation system rendering English into Irish Sign Language through an avatar, extending language technology to a long-excluded community.
- Lead researcher
- Irene Murtagh
- Institution
- Technological University Dublin
About the project
ISL Translate established a fully functional Irish Sign Language (ISL) machine translation (MT) system, leveraging avatar technology to translate a constrained set of English sentences into ISL.
While natural language processing and machine translation have rapidly advanced for spoken and written languages, sign languages have historically been excluded from these technologies. ISL Translate addressed this gap, improving accessibility for the estimated 72 million deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals worldwide and supporting under-resourced languages.
ISL Translate successfully created an ISL avatar capable of producing synthetic sign language and demonstrated potential applications in public services (e.g., railway stations, airports, ATMs), governmental communications, and corporate accessibility initiatives.
The Key objectives for ISL Translate are:
1.Developing an ISL lexicon and avatar capable of generating accurate synthetic sign language.
2.Implementing a machine translation system linking English input to the avatar output, producing real-time ISL translations.
3. Advancing assistive technology use.
Last updated: 8 September 2026
Project team
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