# convert to pdf
unoconv -f pdf myfile1.odt myfile2.odt ...
# merge pdfs
pdftk myfile1.pdf myfile2.pdf ...
# remove individual pdf documents
rm myfile1.pdf myfile2.pdf ...


A handy little hack to generate my entire portfolio.

So I stood up to the challenge and tried to interpret Ben’s talk to the audience. It was a very strange experience as I’d never really interpreted from BSL to English apart from in small groups, or even seen it done very often – most interpreters I see are from English to BSL for Ben’s benefit. I wasn’t sure how well it went as knew I didn’t manage to get everything across, my language was quite simple compared to what Ben was trying to articulate, and I did swap from the 1st person (the correct method where I pretend to be Ben) to the 3rd a couple of times. However, a few people (including Ben himself) were extremely generous with their praise which was fantastic to hear (e.g. here, here, here and here).

Following that talk I was full of confidence and so then happily interpreted for Ben at the next one (someone else on stage, English to BSL). Definitely got a rush that day, very exciting. Maybe I’ll do more of this in the future…

P.S. I know I’ve done more signed versions of BSL-related posts in the past but I’m finding it quite hard to find the time to do it. Writing is much quicker for me and to then translate I need to get a camera, work out what I want so sign, how to translate etc. Maybe it would be better to start with a BSL version and translate that to English instead. I’ll have a think about it and see what I can do.

Blogs

• Benfletcher’s Weblog (from my good friend Ben)
• Bsl Jeff’s Vlog
• gwallgofi
• Noesis
• Grumpy Old Deafies
• This site (anything tagged ‘bsl’ that I put up here)

Online dictionaries (there’s many more but here’s a couple)

• Mobilesign
• ICT Dictionary (a list of some common technical BSL signs)

Other resources

• My bookmarks tagged ‘bsl’ (should have everything here already and will be updated as and when I find anything interesting)
• Some multi channel signs
• BDA Sign Community
• DeafPulse.com

For the non-technical amongst you it’s worth pointing out that all these blogs (and some of the other sites) have feeds that can be subscribed to so you are notified of new posts. Worth checking out rather than regularly going to each and every page looking for updates. Google Reader is a fairly good aggregator to use for this purpose – check out this video for a really good simple explanation of it all.

If anyone has any more recommendations, please add them as comments below or let me know some other way.

Some common uses of facial features for such differentiation are as follows:

• Pursed lips: taking your time
• Clenched teeth: in a rush
• Puffed cheeks: doing hard work, talking about something large/heavy
• Closed lips (MM): as normal, steadily
• TH: carelessly/messily, boring
• Pouted lips: small, few, cheap

P.S. I didn’t do a signed version of this post as I wasn’t quite sure where to start! Apologies but I’m just not good enough

In general this make it easier to remember a few signs as they are made up of logical component signs but it can get a little confusing in some situations. An example that I always forget are the signs for ‘lifeguard’ and ‘lifeboat’. The ‘lifeguard’ sign is made up of the signs for ‘life’ then ‘rescue’, whereas the sign for ‘lifeboat’ is made up of the signs ‘rescue’ then ‘boat’.

A few other common examples are:

• Deadline – date + cut-off
• Stranger – person + who?
• Answer – ask + response
• Repeat – say + again

By the way, today my friend Ben was on See Hear as one of the 4 selected deaf faces of 2008 – take a look.

One of the things that people struggle to understand when learning BSL is how the word ordering differs from English. For example, consider the sentence ‘Why was the black cat climbing the tree in your garden yesterday?’. This would be translated to ‘yesterday your garden tree black cat climb why?’. In BSL, words are normally ordered as follows:

1. Timeline (yesterday)
2. Location (your garden)
3. Object (tree)
4. Subject (black cat)
5. Verb (climb)
6. Question (why)

This is a simple example but can be used to help translate any English to BSL. Note that things like ‘and’, ‘because’ and ‘he said’ split a sentence into multiple parts and should be treated individually.

BSL version (I didn’t wimp out this time!)

A very good friend of mine (Ben) is deaf. We’ve known each other about three and a half years but communication at first was very slow because Ben is profoundly deaf, his first language is BSL (British Sign Language) and he also doesn’t lipread. We started with writings on pieces of paper being passed back and forth, followed by Ben teaching some basic fingerspelling (signing letters of the alphabet), followed by an introduction to some rudimentary bits of sign language. At this point I decided that learning BSL properly would not only be really interesting, it’d be damn useful to be able to communicate with Ben by a quicker means other than something similar in speed to morse code. Since then I’ve completed the CACDP BSL level 1 and 2 courses and on Tuesday I started my level 3 course (it was supposed to start in September but has been delayed a few times).

This course is even more time consuming that the two before; level 1 was two hours a week, level 3 was two and a half hours and level 3 is now 3 hours. So for the next 30 weeks (plus any holidays the college has) I’ll be studying 6:30 to 9:30 on Tuesday evenings… phew! Given that we’re up to level 3, I expected the class to be quite small but there were 17 of us – and of course I was the only guy, as with both my previous courses. What is it about guys not wanting to learn BSL? Very few centres appear to offer the level 3 course so this probably has something to do with the class size, along with the fact that it appears to be a lot cheaper than anywhere else!

We started with the usual introductory-type things, working in pairs to discuss our jobs, interests etc and then present to the class on the snippets of information we’d gleaned from our partner. Then after a much-needed tea break we jumped straight into a discussion on some fundamental BSL grammatical concepts. The important thing to realise about BSL (and other sign languages) is that it isn’t simply English represented by visual movements; BSL is an entirely different language in its own right with it’s own word ordering and many other unique approaches to communication (although some people do sign with SSE – Sign Supported English). To give you an idea of the things that make up the language, some of the grammatical items we discussed are as follows:

It’s difficult to explain some of these without a visual aid and I could be doing this all day so these are just quick summaries – feel free to contact me if you want a more detailed explanation.

So there you go, a quick introduction to my signing history and a glimpse into what a sign language class might involve.