Students at Mary Chapman School for the Deaf attend the launch ceremony for the sign language dictionary on December 1. Pic: Aung Tun Win

THE launching ceremony for Myanmar’s first standardised sign language dictionary was held at Mary Chapman School for the Deaf in Yangon’s Dagon township on December 1.

U Sit Myaing, the director general of the Department of Social Welfare under the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, said at the ceremony that the two-volume dictionary will help improve education for deaf students and facilitate better communication among the hearing-impaired.

“Mutual understanding, trust and friendship will definitely be encouraged. We can say that the life of deaf people in Myanmar has entered a new era,” he said.

The dictionary was compiled based on hand signs commonly used in Yangon and Mandalay, as a collaborative effort between Mary Chapman School for the Deaf, Mandalay School for the Deaf and deaf clubs in both cities.

“In practice, the compiling of the dictionary was delayed by the difficulties of technology, equipment and human resources. There was much confusion and negotiation,” U Sit Myaing said.

Daw Magrette Kyaw Mya, the principal of Mary Chapman School for the Deaf, who contributed to the project, told The Myanmar Times that the dictionary would have been “impossible to complete without cooperation between deaf people and ordinary people”.

“We all worked together to finish the project,” she said, adding that the dictionary will be distributed to deaf students through the Department of Basic Education under the Ministry of Education.

The two-volume set includes about 1500 hand signs for the 33 letters of the Myanmar alphabet, as well as for verbs, antonyms, animals, vegetables, colours and words related to schools and departments, villages, townships, states and divisions, weather conditions, days and dates in both Myanmar and English, together with illustrations.

The compilation and publication of the dictionary was funded by the Myanmar Education Research Bureau under the Ministry of Education, and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

The signs for the Myanmar alphabet had been developed based on a visit to Myanmar in 1986 by Dr Susan Brainerd from Canada, who led a one-month training course at Mandalay School for the Deaf, and on a visit to a four-month training program in Thailand by a teacher from the school the following year.

Earlier this year U Sit Myaing signed a memorandum of understanding with the Myanmar representatives of JICA, Ms Michiko Umezaki, for the social management of programs aimed at helping deaf people live as equals in their communities.