In May, I was a guest for two days in Helsinki at Humak University, a cooperation university of HAW Landshut. Together with my colleague Peter Craxton, I was invited to an event there. Mr. Craxton is a project collaborator in the research project "Digital support for the professional integration of deaf people" and is working on the topic of signwriting in this context. I already have many years of relevant experience in this area and was therefore also invited to the event.
We gave a presentation on our project activities as part of the "International Days of Linguistic Accessibility" (IDLA for short). The conference corresponds thematically to our project, which aims to create access for deaf people in the workplace through sign language and signwriting. In our presentation, we explained the project goals regarding the situation of deaf people in the workplace and how SignScript can lead to an improvement of the current situation. On the one hand, deaf people in the workplace can benefit from the possibility of sign search and from a specialized sign lexicon adapted to their field of work. On the other hand, signwriting can also assist in the use of contrastive grammar. Our presentation at the IDLA conference highlighted these issues. In a subsequent workshop, I gave an introduction to the use of SignScript and its different hand shapes and parameters. The participants showed great interest in learning about SignSpelling. Afterwards, Peter Craxton and I showed the participants different technical terms using the SignSearch, which resulted from a cooperation partnership with Airbus. Overall, it was a very interesting experience for us.
Even before the start of the congress, I offered a seminar for Finnish students in sign language interpreting as part of an Erasmus project. I do not know Finnish or Finnish Sign Language, so I used International Sign. There is no official International Sign Language, but through language contact, elements of different sign languages, and trying to express oneself as iconically and visually as possible, linguistic conventions can emerge. Through this calibration with the language use of the other person, an exchange becomes possible and the content was fully accessible to the students.
In Helsinki, I also met a sign language interpreting student from Landshut University of Applied Sciences who is currently on a semester abroad at Humak University. He, too, does not know the Finnish spoken and written language, but he made impressive progress in Finnish sign language during his semester abroad. For him, the semester abroad was a complete success and a stay that was definitely worthwhile. Through my visit to Humak University and the exchange with the faculty there, I was able to gain interesting insights and experiences that I will take back with me to Landshut.
At the IDLA conference, a speaker used the following quote from Nelson Mandela, which I found particularly beautiful and impressive: "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart". In relation to sign language, this quote is very appropriate and I take it with me as a beautiful memory.
