An exciting project is about to be launched to provide Deaf Christians with tools to grow in their faith and reach other Deaf people with the gospel. Wycliffe Australia, Bible Society of Australia and Alpha Australia have been close partners in creating a translation of the Alpha course into Auslan – Australian Sign Language.
Rebecca Thurrowgood (right) signing for the Alpha videos in Auslan.
Rebecca Thurrowgood is a Wycliffe Australia member who has been coordinating the Auslan translation. The collaboration with Alpha and Bible Society was especially meaningful to her as it enabled various skills, experience, connections and resources to come together to fulfil a growing need within the Deaf Church.
Rebecca’s parents are both committed followers of Christ, yet they have found that, as Deaf people, their ability to fully engage in the life of the Church has always been a struggle. Although work is underway for a translation of the Bible into Auslan, the translation of Scripture is only in its early stages and there is currently a lack of Scripture engagement and outreach tools to reach the Deaf in Australia. Rebecca shares:
At the end of 2023, Bible Society was chatting to me about what things we could do for the Deaf community in regards to translation. I mentioned that my dad had said he’d really love a translation of the Alpha series. Wycliffe Bible Translators Australia, Bible Society Australia and Alpha Australia met to discuss how this could work and, after just 45 minutes, we were all keen to get started.
The first goal of the Auslan Alpha project was to provide resources to help Deaf Christians to grow in their faith and understanding of Scripture. A second but just as important goal was to equip Deaf people to reach out to others. Rebecca explains:
The Deaf Church hasn’t really reached the next generation. Just like a lot of [hearing] churches in Australia, we have an ageing Church. We want to ensure that we’re not starting from scratch in ten years’ time. At the moment, the Deaf community in Australia is an unreached people group, essentially. We want to change that.
A professional studio has been set up at the Wycliffe Australia National Office in Kangaroo Ground and that space was used to film the Auslan Alpha videos in September 2024. Rebecca says that all of the interpreters they brought in were Christians who had a deep affinity with Alpha and a desire to reach Deaf audiences with the gospel. One of the interpreters was on set filming when she mentioned that she had offered to run the Alpha course in her church. The Auslan Alpha resources had not yet been finished but she really wanted to test them out and see how much interest there was. Rebecca recalls:
The translator told me: ‘I only have 10 weeks this year that I can run an Alpha course. When I told some Deaf friends about it, they were happy to come along. She later messaged me, saying, ‘There are five Deaf people who don’t yet know Jesus coming to the Alpha course! I’ve got eight people turning up and a church has offered to host it for us.’
The Auslan Alpha team presented at the Australian Deaf Christian Network conference in January and Rebecca says they were given permission to start promoting the upcoming Alpha series:
Around 60 Deaf people were in the audience. When they saw the preview of the Auslan Alpha videos, they were so excited. One of the ladies got up, and she cried, ‘I have been praying for years that there would be Alpha for the Deaf. God just answered my prayers.’
Rebecca is still beaming since the project has started wrapping up. She says:
I think the biggest challenge with this project was that none of us had ever done anything like it before. But God made it happen. It is always beautiful to see organisations coming together and partnering in a vision.
In that day the deaf will hear words read from a book, and the blind will see through the gloom and darkness. – Isaiah 28:18 (NLT)
Do you remember listening to Bible stories in Sunday School? For many Deaf children, there are very few resources available for them to learn more about God’s love for them. So far, only American Sign Language (ASL) has the full Bible available. Australian Sign Language (Auslan) only has a few books translated and does not have any resources to support Scripture engagement. Wycliffe Bible Translators Australia members Saul and Rebecca Thurrowgood want to change that.
Saul & Rebecca Thurrowgood and their children
The Thurrowgoods have been working in partnership with the Bible Society to create animated Bible stories for children in Auslan. The Christmas story was released at the end of 2022 and an Easter message was recently published. The videos are based on evangelical children’s booklets the Bible Society produced a couple of years ago. They have been created using the motion capture Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool called ‘Chameleon’ which Saul and his team have been refining for the past 10 years ’and which converts the signed movements from a real person to an animated character.
Saul explains:
Last year, the Bible Society wanted to see if they could use Chameleon for translation projects and they came to check it out. We trialled the technology with the Christmas story and were thrilled that it worked so well. The second time around, everything worked even more smoothly with the Easter story. All the characters are consistent throughout the series. It’s been a long time building up but we’re finally seeing fruit from all the years of hard work to get Chameleon off the ground.
Rebecca adds:
A screenshot of the Easter video translated into Auslan.
I’ve been thinking a lot about creating resources for kids to put online to equip the church. These videos are like a seed – the first in a way of creating resources for Deaf children. Auslan has its own linguistic style that is very poetic visually that would not translate the same way in spoken English. These videos provide the stories in a form that kids can easily understand. We have a dream for Deaf community to be able to connect with the gospel. The children’s stories we’ve created using Chameleon so far will hopefully be a good start.
Pray:
for more people to join the team! We need workers highly skilled in programming, computer science, AI, computer vision and robotics
that the Auslan translation of the Easter story can continue to be shared with Deaf children throughout Australia and open their hearts to the love of Jesus
for the languages and countries that have shared an interest in using Chameleon
More: To watch the video, click here. To visit the Chameleon website, click here.
Chameleon: changing the future of Deaf Bible translation
By Deb Fox | Wycliffe Today Spring Edition 2020 |
Saul and Rebecca Thurrowgood are Wycliffe members who have just welcomed the birth of their fifth child. They are also excited about the arrival of a program Saul and his team have spent many years perfecting in partnership with the Deaf Bible Society: Chameleon. Rebecca explains that, just like the chameleon’s ability to adapt and change in order to communicate, ‘the goal of Chameleon is bringing the gospel to the Deaf in a new way that protects the people involved by changing their appearance.’
Currently, less than two per cent of the world’s Deaf identify as followers of Jesus. Many do not have access to God’s Word in a language they understand—their own sign language. There are over twenty-five sign languages with portions of Scripture available on video but there are significant barriers to videoing real people for the translation of the remaining sign languages.
For many regions around the world, persecution is a daily occurrence. Therefore, filming a real person recording sign movements in their local sign language may be a dangerous move. Another barrier which often presents itself in small Deaf communities is denominational differences among Christians. Unlike the anonymity of a printed Bible translation, the face of the signer may become attached to the signed translation. If their character, past life or community become an issue, they risk overriding the message of the gospel. The use of animated characters eliminates these risks and also enables the translation work to be accelerated.
How does the technology work?
Chameleon is a form of motion capture technology which uses artificial intelligence which the team has trained to create neural networks1 for an avatar (an animated character) to copy.2 In order to create the neural networks, they have had to source movements from as many places as possible, including videos already available from the Deaf Bible Society and filming live recordings in a studio.
Saul says:
We need the computer to track the person, regardless of their shape, size, ethnicity and gender. We need to train the computer to recognise the various parts of the body. We have trained the computer’s neural networks to recognise different locations including the body, the hand and five different neural networks in the face. There are hundreds of thousands of images fed into the computer in order for it to recognise various shapes. Once it can remember specific movements, the avatar can be asked to perform a number of sign movements.
Rebecca explains: ‘We’re trying to get the computer to recognise the movements. Perfect copying means a better data output—the better that is, the better the outcome is.’
After many years of setbacks and trials, Chameleon 1.0 is almost ready for release. Saul says that the team was excited to discover that a team in South-East Asia had been using the pre-release version of the program and it worked better than expected.
Rebecca adds:
To know that this technology is being used for its intended purpose is a huge blessing. We are so grateful knowing that this product will be a way to get the gospel out to places where it otherwise may have been impossible to create a sign language translation safely.
1 Neural networks: A set of algorithms, modeled loosely after the human brain, that are designed to recognise patterns. 2 An avatar is an electronic image that represents—and may be manipulated by—a computer user.
Thanks for your patience...
Waiting is hard, isn't it. But imagine waiting 2000 years for Scripture in your language! Thanks for your patience. And thanks for your generous support which will help bring the long wait to an end...
Thanks for your patience...