EPIGRAPHY IN ITALIAN SIGN LANGUAGE (LIS)

Year 2018

The project was designed to make the most important ancient Roman epigraphs kept in the Leone Museum in Vercelli accessible to deaf people; the objective was the creation of a visual guide, consisting of a series of films in LIS (Italian sign language) loaded on a tablet made available, free of charge at the entrance to the Museum, to people with hearing disabilities; the deaf visitor can thus independently follow a museum itinerary and enjoy the ancient inscriptions kept there.

The films include both the preliminary cultural illustration of the epigraph and the translation of the Latin text into LIS. All the films use the visual language channel of the LIS, overcoming the barrier of the traditional text written in Italian on an explanatory panel (often discouraging and insufficient for the full enjoyment of an epigraph by a non-specialist audience - not just the deaf). The project also aims at subtitling the films in Italian, in order to meet the personal linguistic, cognitive and cultural needs of all deaf people, even those who do not have a full command of sign language.