There are many ways you can volunteer to help keep this archive alive and breathing, and helping make our videos accessible to all New Zealanders by transcribing or translating videos in the SignDNA archive is extremely helpful! Transcribing or translating videos can either be transcribing what is said in spoken language on some videos, or creating a written translation of what is signed, either in English or in te reo Māori. These tasks are very helpful and enable a new group of people to access the archive, as well as make the signs themselves more searchable making research easier. This work also involves improving transcript text for scanned articles.
We believe that SignDNA could be a great tool for linguistic research, as it provides genuine samples of naturally produced language from the 1950s right through to the 1990s. It has been fascinating to see some signs we assumed to be recent additions actually show up in some of the earliest black and white films in the archive. Translating these videos will help to make SignDNA a more effective tool to find and compare versions of signs over the years. Please get in touch with us if you are interested in transcribing or translating videos on the archive. We will gladly provide you with some technical training on how to do this.
SignDNA’s philosophy
SignDNA is an archive that belongs to the Aotearoa New Zealand Deaf community. We would love to caption all videos to make it available to the greater community, however this takes time and energy to do. This is one of our aspirations. Our policy is to ensure that all spoken content on videos that are not captioned, needs to be captioned before making available on the archive. This means the Deaf community can access this content.
Videos with spoken te reo Māori content
Some videos SignDNA receives are in te reo Māori. Over the years, before adding them to the archive, we have organised translation of those items from te reo Māori into written English captions, in order for the Deaf community to access this content. It is our intention to also caption this content in written te reo Māori for Turi Māori and te reo speakers to access. If you are able and willing to help us transcribe this te reo content, please get in touch with us!
Correcting text in newspaper articles
Newspaper articles on the archive are currently not searchable, other than the title of the article or the keywords assigned to it. This is because while the articles have been scanned and OCR transcribed, the OCR text needs fixing before being made available on the archive. If you’re keen to volunteer and improve transcript text for scanned articles, please get in touch with us.