The lack of sincere, efficient and enthusiastic people who would be willing to work for the welfare of the speech and hearing impaired is a major concern, believes Shireen Begum, President of the Bangladesh Women Deaf Welfare Association. How can people with absolutely no idea about the language be involved in a committee that works to standardise it? However, only four amongst them can actually communicate using the language while the rest don't have any knowledge regarding the language. For instance, the Ministry of Social Welfare had formed a committee of 14 members to standardise the Bangla sign language at the beginning of the year. I believe having a language institute for Bangla sign language is an imperative for its development and preservation.”Įven though recent steps have been taken to improve the state of things, these well-intentioned initiatives seem to be carelessly and negligently planned out. “The government has taken a remarkable initiative to preserve and protect endangered languages of the minority groups of the country by establishing eight language institutes all over the country,” says Osman Khaled, chairman of SDSL.“However, despite being a language of a large number of people, sign language does not seem to be getting the attention from the state that it truly deserves. “Being an interpreter is not an easy feat, one should take this profession with proper honesty and training.” “To be a sign language interpreter in a news channel it's very important to belong to an environment where you have dealt with hearing impaired people for a longer period,” believes Arafat Sultana Lata, a sign language interpreter of BTV news. “The presence of sign language interpreters in events and on television media is unsatisfactory,” says Mizanur Rahman General Secretary of SDSL. However, advocates argue that even though you will find some television channels incorporating interpreting the speech being stated into sign language, there is still a lot to be done to include sign language interpretation into mainstream media. The inclusion of news interpreters for people with hearing and speech impediments is surely an achievement for sign language users. In fact for last twenty years Bangladesh Government has not taken that many significant initiative in the development of Bangla sign language, comments Firoze Ahmad, General Secretary, Bangladesh National federation of the Deaf (BNFD). However, since then the content of the dictionary is not being comprehensively revised or the entire work is not being updated. Since then, this dictionary has been treated as a treasure resource to all the sign language enthusiasts, including both the learners and the instructors. In the year of 1994, Ministry of Social Welfare and Bangladesh National Federation of the Deaf collaboratively published a Bangla sign language dictionary in a view to making sign language popular to everyone. The sign language users regard a few of the initiatives taken by the Bangladesh Government as a milestone in recognising their language.
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