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CHI '26 · Honorable mention · full-paper review · confidence medium-high

Reimagining Sign Language Technologies: Analyzing Translation Work of Chinese Deaf Online Content Creators

Xinru Tang , Anne Marie Piper

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This is a strong CHI qualitative contribution because it does not merely document user needs; it repositions sign-language translation as culturally and politically situated work. The novelty is conceptual and empirical, but the evidence remains bounded to a small, specific creator sample and should not be read as system validation.

Axes Lens

Rare contribution shape, typical evidence profile. The point here is not a score. It is to show what kind of claim the paper makes, and whether the evidence pattern is unusual or baseline in this 268 -review set.

Review Summary

This paper’s main value is that it challenges a common technical framing in sign-language technology research: the assumption that translation can be treated as a relatively direct mapping between sign and text. The authors instead show, through interviews with 13 deaf Chinese content creators, that translation is embedded in multilingual, multicultural, and political meaning-making practices. That is a meaningful departure from common-sense system thinking because it moves the unit of analysis away from the algorithm and toward lived translation work. The novelty is not a new interface or model, but a reframing of the problem space grounded in deaf-led practice and the sociolinguistic concept of (trans)languaging. In CHI terms, this is best read as an empirical and conceptual contribution that expands the design space for future systems. At the same time, the validation scope is intentionally narrow: the evidence comes from a qualitative study of creators on video-sharing platforms, not from deployment, benchmarking, or audience-side evaluation. The authors also acknowledge important limitations, including limited sign-language proficiency, purposive/snowball sampling bias, and the fact that audience reception was not studied. So the paper is persuasive as a field argument and as a source of design implications, but it should not be overread as demonstrating a generalizable translation solution. Its strongest contribution is to reorient the field’s assumptions about what sign-language translation work actually is.

What Changed

Canon before

Prior CHI work on sign language technologies has often framed translation as a technical mapping problem or focused on interpreting/access support, rather than on deaf creators’ lived translation practices as sociolinguistic work.

Departure from common sense

The paper argues that sign language translation should not be reduced to direct sign-to-text alignment; instead, it is a broader translation space shaped by multilingualism, multiculturalism, and politics in deaf creators’ everyday practice.

Actual novelty

The paper’s novelty is in centering Chinese deaf online content creators’ translation work as the empirical basis for rethinking sign language translation systems, rather than treating translation as a narrow technical pipeline or studying only professional interpreting contexts.

Evidence

The paper uses interviews with 13 deaf Chinese content creators who produce sign language content for deaf and hearing audiences on video-sharing platforms. The discussion reframes translation through a languaging perspective and explicitly states that translation is not a direct alignment between sign and text. The limitations section notes constrained sign-language proficiency, purposive/snowball sampling bias, and the absence of audience reception analysis.

Limits

Method limits

The study is qualitative and interview-based, with limited sign-language proficiency acknowledged by the authors as potentially constraining interpretation of participants’ language use. Recruitment via purposive and snowball sampling may bias the sample toward creators from more developed regions and with higher education.

Deployment limits

The findings are grounded in a specific creator/platform context and do not directly validate a deployable translation system. The authors also note that they did not examine audience reception, so implications for downstream users and real-world system uptake remain indirect.

Boundary conditions

The evidence is bounded to 13 Chinese deaf online content creators active on video-sharing platforms and to the translation practices they describe. Generalization beyond this sociocultural and platform context should be cautious, especially for other sign languages, other countries, or professional interpreting settings.

Manual check: false

Position in field

This is a field-reframing contribution: it shifts CHI sign-language-technology discourse from translation as a technical conversion problem toward translation as deaf-led sociolinguistic practice, using (trans)languaging as the conceptual lens.

Abstract

While sign language translation systems promise to enhance deaf people's access to information and communication, they have been met with strong skepticism from deaf communities due to risks of misrepresenting and oversimplifying the richness of signed communication in technologies. This article provides empirical evidence of the complexity of translation work involved in deaf communication through interviews with 13 deaf Chinese content creators who actively produce and share sign language content on video sharing platforms with both deaf and hearing audiences. By studying this unique group of content creators, our findings highlight the nuances of sign language translation, showing how deaf creators create content with multilingualism and multiculturalism in mind, support meaning making across languages and cultures, and navigate politics involved in their translation work. Grounded in these deaf-led translation practices, we draw on the sociolinguistic concept of (trans)languaging to re-conceptualize and reimagine the design of sign language translation systems.