VDEI has recently partnered with Monash University to sponsor the expansion of Auslan Signbank, the national public online Auslan dictionary. Contributing to the expansion of Signbank demonstrates our commitment to improving the Auslan skills of the workforce, families and communities that engage and communicate with deaf and hard of hearing students nationwide.
Auslan Signbank 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.
This latest expansion of Signbank will contribute nearly 1200 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. The majority of the additional signs have not been published previously and will be either brand new signs or a previously unrecorded variant of a sign, whilst others may have been published, but are very old and of low digital quality.
Professor Trevor Johnston, creator of the first Auslan dictionary and the term 'Auslan', has completed the necessary lexicographical work for this project and has written the definitions required to include the signs in the Signbank Auslan language resource.
Contributing to the expansion of Signbank is an effective way for VDEI to demonstrate our commitment to improving the Auslan skills of the workforce, families and communities that engage and communicate with deaf and hard of hearing students nationwide.
