Since the law was voted the 11-02-2005 for equal rights and opportunities: places open to anyone (public places, shops, internet, etc.) should welcome the Deaf in French Sign Language (FSL). We have worked on the development of technological tools to promote LSF, especially in machine translation from written French to FSL. Our thesis begins with a presentation of knowledge on FSL (theoretical resources and ways to edit FSL) and follows by further concepts of descriptive grammar. Our working hypothesis is: FSL is a language and, therefore, machine translation is relevant. We describe the language specifications for automatic processing, based on scientific knowledge and proposals of our native FSL speaker informants. We also expose our methodology, and do present the advancement of our work in the formalization of linguistic data based on the specificities of FSL which certain (verbs scheme, adjective and adverb modification, organization of nouns, agreement patterns) require further analysis. We do present the application framework in which we worked on: the machine translation system and virtual characters animation system of France Telecom R&D. After a short avatar technology presentation, we explain our control modalities of the gesture synthesis engine through the exchange format that we developed. Finally, we conclude with an evaluation, researches and developments perspectives that could follow this thesis. Our approach has produced its first results since we have achieved our goal of running the full translation chain: from the input of a sentence in French to the realization of the corresponding sentence in FSL with a synthetic character.
