Translating Veditz

The language George Veditz used in his film, The Preservation of Sign Language, requires translation at several levels in order to fully capture the power of the film. First is the translation from American Sign Language to English, aided in part by the discovery of George Veditz's own written version of the filmed speech. However, the written version does not exactly match the filmed version, which leaves additional translation issues to be resolved. Translating Veditz needs to capture the form of signed oratory in 1913. Some of these differences include lexical change over time, differences in use of fingerspelling, and differences in signed intonation.