The Asian Sign Bank (ASB) has rich data in sign languages in the Asia-Pacific Region. There are videos and information stored in the ASB and they can be accessed and viewed by sign language researchers, teachers and interpreters for the purpose of sign language research and development. The ASB was designed and developed by The Asia-Pacific Sign Linguistics Research and Training Program (APSL) sponsored financially by The Nippon Foundation (TNF).

There are two ways to search signs in the ASB. First, you can look up the handshapes of the signs. Second, you can type the spoken word. For each sign language, there are two corresponding spoken languages: English and the spoken language of that country. For example, for Jakarta Sign Language, you can search by typing the words in Bahasa Indonesia or English. Similarly, if you want to look for a sign in Japanese Sign Language, you can type the word in Japanese or English. For Hong Kong Sign Language, you can search by typing Traditional Chinese characters or English.

Besides, you may find a sign by searching one-handed signs or two-handed signs. However, to look at more information on the phonetic features, such as orientation, movement, location and non-manual expressions, you need to sign up and then log in. Moreover, you can download an EXCEL file and get the meanings of different sign words there.

For sign language teachers, you can choose the vocabularies that you plan to teach in the ASB. After selecting the signs, there are functions in the ASB that allow you to organize and print the information of the signs as a pdf file. The ASB has many more benefits. If you would like to know more, please contact us via email at asiansignbank@cslds.org. Thank you.