Deaf people communicate naturally using visual-spatial languages, called sign languages (SL). Although SLs are recognized as a language in many countries, the problems faced by Deaf people for accessing information remain. As a result, they have difficulties exercising their citizenship and access information in SLs, which usually leads to linguistic and knowledge acquisition delays. Some scientific works have been developed to address these problems related to the machine translation of spoken languages to sign languages. However, the existing machine translation platforms have some limitations, especially in syntactic and lexical nature. Thus, this work aims to develop a mechanism for machine translation to Libras, the Brazilian Sign Language, with syntactic-semantic adequacy. It consists of an automatic translation component for Libras based on syntactic-semantic translation rules and a formal syntactic-semantic rule description language. As proof of concept of the proposed approach, we created a specific grammar for Libras translation exploring these aspects and integrating these elements into VLibras Suite, a service for machine translation of digital content in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) to Libras. We performed several tests using this modified version of VLibras to measure the level of comprehension of the output generated by the new translator mechanism. In the computational experiments, as well as in the actual tests with Deaf and hearing users, the proposed approach was able to improve the results of the current VLibras version.

聋人使用称为手语 (SL) 的视觉空间语言进行自然交流。尽管许多国家都承认 SL 是一种语言，但聋人在获取信息方面面临的问题仍然存在。因此，他们难以行使公民身份并在 SL 中获取信息，这通常会导致语言和知识获取延迟。已经开发了一些科学著作来解决与口语到手语的机器翻译相关的这些问题。然而，现有的机器翻译平台存在一些局限性，尤其是在句法和词汇方面。因此，这项工作旨在开发一种机器翻译机制，将机器翻译为巴西手语 Libras，并具有足够的句法语义。它由一个基于句法语义翻译规则的 Libras 自动翻译组件和一个正式的句法语义规则描述语言组成。作为所提出方法的概念证明，我们为 Libras 翻译创建了一个特定语法，探索这些方面并将这些元素集成到 VLibras Suite 中，这是一项将巴西葡萄牙语 (BP) 的数字内容机器翻译成 Libras 的服务。我们使用这个修改后的 VLibras 版本进行了几次测试，以测量新翻译机制生成的输出的理解水平。在计算实验以及聋人和听力用户的实际测试中，所提出的方法能够改善当前 VLibras 版本的结果。