On Sunday February 18, two members of the project team, David Falguera and myself, Delfina Aliaga, went to make recordings for the corpus. This time, we went to the association Llar de Persones Sordes de Badalona, located very close to the city of Barcelona.

As you can see on the association’s website, a whole range of activities are organized for members, either weekly, fortnightly, or monthly. Many members of all ages are enrolled: youth, adults, and seniors. Thus, the project team decided to expand the corpus data with these very diverse profiles of the association. As always, we recorded pairs of people according to their age range, one adult and one middle-aged pair, who went to different schools. Fortunately, we were also able to carry out the recordings of  young people, something that had not been possible for some time in associations in other provinces of Catalonia.

The recordings of the three pairs of people lasted all day on Sunday. It was a very compact and exhausting day, but we were able to finish the entire recording in a single day. We would like to thank the Llar de Persones Sordes de Badalona again for their participation. Below you can see some images taken during Sunday’s recordings.

Last October 2022, David Falguera and I went to the Association of Deaf in Manresa (Casa Social del Sord de Manresa i Comarques). Its origins go back to 1953 and, thus, this year 2023 marks 70 years since its foundation.

The association is still active and has registered partners, of which we have selected a total of four to make the recordings of the corpus. Two of them are elderly, while the other two are middle-aged. Unfortunately, no young people have registered to date, but we are still in contact with the association so that if they do so later, we can record them. Precisely, one of the elderly people we have recorded is the president of the association of Manresa, who has held this position for many years now, with the objective of promoting the integration and inclusion of the Deaf in society, as well as offering Catalan Sign Language courses.

Finally, we would like to thank the Casa Social del Sord de Manresa i Comarques for their participation. They opened their doors on a Sunday so we could go and make the recordings of the corpus.

Hello! Last November 2021, David Falguera and I went to the Associació de Persones Sordes de Cambrils. It was not the first time we went there. Two years ago with Xavier Álvarez we had already gone to record data with the adult and the elderly people. The pair of young people could not be filmed due to lack of native signers. We were recently told that there were Deaf signers who were close in age to the young age range. With the members of the Corpus team we decided that it would be interesting to go back to Cambrils to record them. We made the appointment on a Sunday, but since it was precisely the day that the association was closed, we decided to make the recordings in their home, and we were all very comfortable. It was a pleasure for everyone to make the recordings and it was very interesting. We want to thank the signers for helping us on a holiday to move forward with the Corpus project.

Last Sunday, November 14, 2021, we returned to the Association of Deaf people in Terrassa (Associació de Persones Sordes de Terrassa, APESOTE). More than five years ago we had already made recordings of the two adult and elderly people, but then we did not film the young ones because at that time the entity did not have the necessary signer profiles. Just before the pandemic we had contacted APESOTE to make these recordings, but the COVID pandemic stopped the plan. With the return to activities, we took the opportunity to resume contacts and two members of our team, David Falguera and myself, made the recordings. David Falguera was attending the elicitation sessions for the first time and filming the productions of the two young Deaf people was a very enriching experience. We want to thank APESOTE and its president for opening the doors of the association and making us feel so comfortable on this second visit to the entity.

Last October 2019, the LSC Reference Corpus project team visited the Association of Deaf people in Vic and its region (Agrupació de Persones Sordes de Vic i Comarca), founded in 1972. Among the sixty members, we interviewed three groups according to the age range: two people from the group of young, middle and old age. However, on that visit we were not able to carry out the recordings of the group of the young age group, which we will film later. The interviews with the middle-aged people were carried out by Delfina Aliaga. We also had the cooperation of the partner David Puigsallosas, who facilitated the communication and fluidity of the interviews with the adult people. The recording sessions were very successful. Finally, we would like to thank the association for their collaboration, because without it, these sessions would not have been possible.

Throughout 2018 and 2019, the LSC corpus work team made two visits to the Association of Deaf people in Cambrils (Associació de Persones Sordes de Cambrils, ASSORCAM) with the aim of conducting interviews with people of three different age groups. This association was founded in 2009 and currently has 30 members approximately. In 2018 we were able to record a group of middle-aged people thanks to Montserrat Fornés, the general secretary of the association, who acted as mediator. In 2019 we returned to record a group of people from the most advanced age group, again with the help of Montserrat Fornés who, once more, acted as a interlocutor with the partners. In the future we will return to record Deaf people of the younger age group. The recordings we made in Cambrils were a complete success and we would like to sincerely thank the Cambrils association for having collaborated with us.

In November 2016 we were able to make recordings at the CERECUSOR Association, a entity in Barcelona founded in 1941. We were also able to record three pairs of signers thanks to the collaboration of a member of the entity, Xavier Álvarez, who was not only an intermediary, but also an interviewer. From here, we want to thank him, as well as all the associations and contact persons who dedicate their time to the project. Without any doubt, their collaboration is not only very welcome, but of great value for the progress of the project.

In September 2016 we made the recordings of the three groups of Deaf signers (young, adults and elderly) of the Association of Deaf people in Barcelona (Casal de Sords de Barcelona), an entity located on Tamarit Street in Barcelona, which in 2016 celebrated its centenary. For the selection of signers who met the necessary requirements (being a native signer, age range, etc.) we had the valuable collaboration of Delfina Aliaga, who acted as intermediary and interviewer during the recordings. We sincerely appreciate her dedication to the not-so-easy task of scheduling the recordings.

On February 9th, 2019, we already had enough material recorded and annotated to start with the second major project: the lexicographical database of LSC. The first task that we set ourselves within this second project was to extract all the signs of the general and specific dictionaries and other existing materials in LSC. We made a list of all the signs that appeared in the corpus, we linked each of these signs with a video (extracted from the same corpus), to obtain a visual representation of the sign. Once this was done, we begun to search in which LSC materials each of the listed signs appears. If we find it in a dictionary, we write down the reference where it comes from. If there is any variation regarding the image of the corpus sign that we watch, then we also write that down. This task has not yet been completed, but it is serving to verify that on many occasions the same sign receives different glosses and that on many other occasions the same gloss refers to different signs, which is normal when working with two different languages.