Abstract
The advances in Science and Technology made it possible for people with hearing impairments and deaf to be more involved and get better chances of education, access to information, knowledge and interaction with the large society. Exploiting these advances to empower hearing-impaired and deaf persons with knowledge is a challenge as much as it is a need. Here, we present a part of our work in a national project to develop an environment for automatic translation from Arabic to Saudi Sign Language using 3D animations. One of the main objectives of this project is to develop a bilingual parallel corpus for automatic translation purposes; avatar-based 3D animations are also supposed to be built. These linguistic resources will be used for supporting development of ICT applications for deaf community. Due to the complexity of this task, the corpus is being developed progressively. In this paper, we present a first part of the corpus by working on a specific topic from the Islamic sphere.