Maartje De Meulder is a deaf scholar and is currently a lecturer and senior researcher at HU - University of Applied Sciences Utrecht. In 2021 she wrote and published an article titled Is "good enough" good enough? Ethical and responsible development of sign language technologies in the AT4SSL (https://aclanthology.org/2021.mtsummit-at4ssl.2/). We took this opportunity to interview her to discuss the article.

On the 28th of March we organised our third internal seminar, this time presented by Prof. dr. Myriam Vermeerbergen (KU Leuven) and Prof Lorraine Leeson (Trinity College Dublin), who are members of our consortium. It all started with a tasty introduction: "Sign languages are lasagna and spoken languages are spaghetti". Like lasagna, sign language simultaneously contains several layers that together form a meaning. After all, in contrast to spoken language, which is sequential (without co-speech gestures), in sign language information can be conveyed simultaneously via several modalities: hands, mouth image, facial expression, body movement. It was an interesting lecture on various different characteristics of sign languages.