The Contemporary Turkish Sign Language Dictionary is based on the Turkish Sign Language (TİD) Corpus that was obtained from 116 TİD native speakers from 26 different provinces of Turkey. All of the contents in the dictionary that have been designed with videos in the online environment were presented in two languages; these being Turkish and Turkish Sign Language. For this reason it can be defined as the combination of both mother tongue and translation dictionaries. Among the user groups of this dictionary are those within the deaf community, deaf students, TİD students, translators, special education teachers and those with other needs such as researchers.
This corpus based dictionary consists of 2.000 words/concepts that were identified as the most frequent in terms of usage within the corpus. The 11.428 videos within the dictionary are made up of three different types which are; sign (ID-gloss), meaning and example, they were prepared with different background colours to determine their genres. In terms of overall contextual arrangement, the lexical diversity (variety) and the meanings of the word/concept are listed according to the frequency seen within the compilation. Thus the content and arrangement of the dictionary has been determined according to the Language use of TİD native speakers that live in different regions.
With two different search engines, the user is able to find the sign using the Turkish word or the visual properties (phonetics) of the sign. It is thought that the possibility of playing the videos at the preferred speed will enable especially new TİD learners ease when learning. Also with the help of the example videos one can learn the use of the word within the sentence. It is also aimed to help deaf individuals in learning Turkish and hearing individuals in learning TİD by providing the transcriptions and Turkish translations of each video. With these features, there is no doubt that this dictionary will contribute in many ways such as accessing, concept development, and education for the deaf community.
To cite
Makaroğlu, B., & Dikyuva, H. (Eds.). (2017, May). The Contemporary Turkish Sign Language Dictionary. Ankara: The Turkish Ministry of Family and Social Policy. Retrieved from http://tidsozluk.net.
