Construction of a French–LSF corpus

In this article, we present the first academic comparable corpus involving written French and French Sign Language. After explaining our initial motivation to build a parallel set of such data, especially in the context of our work on Sign Language modelling and our prospect of machine translation into Sign Language, we present the main problems posed when mixing language channels and modalities (oral, written, signed), discussing the translation-vs-interpretation narrative in particular. We describe the process followed to guarantee feature coverage and exploitable results despite a serious cost limitation, the data being collected from professional translations. We conclude with a few uses and prospects of the corpus.