SignON: Co-Created Sign Language Translation Framework

SignON received €5,616,718.75 in EU Horizon 2020 funding and ran from January 2021 to December 2023, coordinated by Prof. Andy Way at Dublin City University's ADAPT Centre (Ireland), with Dr Dimitar Shterionov (Tilburg University) as scientific lead. The consortium brought together 17 partner organisations across several European countries.
The project delivered a mobile translation app and an open-source SignON Framework (three releases) translating between Irish, British, Flemish and Dutch Sign Languages plus Spanish Sign Language, and the English, Irish, Dutch and Spanish spoken/written languages. Outputs included new parallel corpora (GoSt-ParC-Sign, BSL-Hansard, NGT-HoReCo), 25 peer-reviewed conference papers and one journal article, and virtual-character (avatar) sign-animation technology reaching Technology Readiness Level 6 — a prototype demonstrated in a relevant operational environment.
Work Package 1, led by the European Union of the Deaf, embedded deaf community members throughout design, development and evaluation, intended as a model for participatory AI development with disability communities.
A 2024 reflexive case study by project researchers (arXiv:2408.13171) examining SignON and a companion project found that, despite this co-creation framing, deaf partners' labour was often under-recognised and under-funded, scientific communication was not always made accessible to participants, and structural ableism persisted within the collaboration; the authors call for centring deaf leadership and redistributing power in future projects. No confirmed public deployment of the translation app beyond the pilot/demonstration stage has been found.

Read the full analysis: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101017255/results