Words in Hand

When we are able to see the face, we are able to get a lot more information. Let us take the sign 'look up' as an example. We know it means look up from the way the hands are. But we don't get the idea that people are looking around from the sign itself. We get that from the head, like this.

One of the most interesting examples from that bit was this. Now you can see that my hand went up out of the screen. Maybe you were wondering what my hand was doing? Now I know what it means, and other people know what my hand is doing, from the information on my face. Because my lip movements are doing a specific thing that is needed for a specific sign. Normally this gives us the information that something is there, that something is present. So we know that outside is windy, so we sign this. I have brought the sign back in frame, bringing my hand down to show you the sign.

You might have noticed as well that there are different ways we can show intensity. So we have the wheel of the boat and we can use our face in different ways, like this. There was another sign there as well, like this.

There are many signs like that and it's difficult to translate. You can't just make these signs without the facial expression. If you tried to sign it … sorry, let me try again! You can't do it like that. It has no meaning. You have to give it the facial expression.

You can see it is difficult to translate. So it might translate as "What in the he [cut off] – what are we going to do?" or something like that. But listen to the voice over translation when you watch the signing in full.