A Community-Driven Dictionary for Portuguese Sign Language

October 28, 2025

Portuguese Sign Language (Lingua Gestual Portuguesa, LGP) is a young language officially acknowledged by the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic in 1997. The natural language of the Portuguese DHH (Deaf or Hard of Hearing) community, lacks standardized mechanisms to keep up with emerging terms. Communities decide which sign to use based on a temporal or local basis, creating multiple signs for different regions. Some signs are used, while others are lost. This lack of standardization creates obstacles to language growth, preservation, learning, communication and collaboration between LGP signers. This work proposes a community-driven dictionary for the DHH communities dispersed throughout Portugal propose, deliberate, and accept new signs. The solution consists of a crowdsourcing platform with deliberative mechanisms, allowing users to submit and deliberate sign entries. These mechanisms also allow users to participate in a community setting, engaging in the platform and with each other. Our development process followed a User-Centered Design approach to engage with the DHH community. Towards the aforementioned, we organized a workshop, collected data through a journey map, and refined our data into Empathy maps. We used said data to implement the features of the community, through iterative phases to check the features with the Community, and ensuring a fair representation. We analyzed user participation, with forms, appraised opportunities and difficulties of the platform through thematic analysis. In this project, we want to empower the Portuguese DHH community to take ownership of LGP through a community-based web platform.

Authors in the community:

• 

  G

  Guilherme Garrilha

  ist1110827

Supervisors of this institution:

• 

  H

  Hugo Nicolau

  ist153934

electrical-engineering-electronic-engineering-information-engineering - Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico