Abstract
In this paper, we present a part of our work related to an ongoing ambitious project funded by the Saudi National plan for Sciences and Technologies, to build a virtual translator from Arabic Text to Saudi Sign Language. This project comprises two main parts. The first part concerns the mapping between words (or morphemes) in the input text and their equivalent signs, and will rely on the sentence structure in both source and target languages. This part represents a pure translation problem, and will be based on transformational grammar. The second part is concerned by the use of avatar-based software to render the resulting sequence of signs. Appropriate tools are used for both pre-creating animated sign-symbols and then signing them at end of the conversion process. This second part is related to the graphical creation and animation of sign language. As a first step toward this end, a bilingual parallel corpus is being developed in an appropriate domain. It is used to build a well founded dictionary, which can be used as a basis of our works. We focus on this paper on the construction of such a dictionary and the creation of 3D animation of its related signs using avatar technologies. A collaborative strategy for enhancing and enlarging the dictionary in an incremental way will also be presented.