Auslan Signbank is a free online site hosted on the Monash University. The Signbank resource provides access to a range of supports to assist learners of Auslan, including:
- a dictionary
- ability to search for signs related to medical and health topics
- ability to search for signs related to educational and teaching topics
- videos of deaf people using the listed Auslan signs
- information on the Deaf community in Australia
- links to Auslan classes.
Although Signbank is a valuable support for Auslan learners, it is important to note that it is not intended to be a stand-alone language learning tool. Ideally, to learn Auslan or any language, it is important to interact with users of the language or attend a course.
The Signbank site is accessed by over 2,500 users every day; it is constantly changing and being updated with new lexical information contributed by the Deaf community or derived from annotations in the Auslan Corpus.
Professor Trevor Johnston, creator of the first Auslan dictionary and the term 'Auslan', has completed the lexicographical work for this project and has written the definitions required to include the signs in the Auslan Signbank language resources.
Since 2004 language researchers have been examining hundreds of hours of videos that record deaf signers using Auslan in conversations, interviews and storytelling. An Expanded Auslan Corpus has since been created with additional detailed annotations for the original Auslan Corpus, as well as for many more of the previously unannotated videos.
The latest expansion of Signbank will contribute nearly 1,200 signs to the current online dictionary. Refining the quality and accuracy of the signs in this valuable Auslan resource will greatly enhance the dictionary and improve the user experience. Most of the additional signs have not been published previously and will be either brand-new signs or a previously unrecorded variant of a sign, while others may have been published but are very old and of low digital quality.
VDEI has proudly funded Monash University to support the Expanded Auslan Corpus. Our support demonstrates a strong commitment to improving the Auslan skills of the workforce, families and communities that support deaf and hard of hearing students in Victoria and throughout Australia.
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