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Hello everyone: here is followup to my query seeking the signed equivalent of "liberty" in Spanish, Russian, South African, and International Sign. I didn't get all the languages I was seeking, but the performance went magnificently all the same! Let me back up here. My chorus has just returned from performing at a choral festival in the U.S. called Sister Singers Network. Several of the participating choruses -- like mine -- routinely have their performances interpreted into ASL. During the last night of this festival, a huge 200-voice chorus of festival attendees was to perform a brand-new piece of music which was written for the occasion by Jenni Brandon, entitled "A Universal Dream". During the last section of this piece, sopranos sing, "libertad, liberte, Freiheit, svoboda, inkululeko, liberta, chofesh, eleftheria" ... all of these words having the same meaning: "liberty". Whew, that's a lot of countries to research! At at the same time, altos are asking several times, "what is it the radicals seek?" before themselves chiming in with "Freiheit, inkululeko" ... etc. Signwriting to the rescue! It was a delight to find Spanish and German equivalents on Puddle already, and to then use Signwriting to record signs from other sources (such as a Russian-signing Deaf acquaintance and an old Gestuno dictionary.) One of the other chorus' interpreters (who herself is also hard-of-hearing like me, ha!) liked my idea of performing this piece as a team, and was very interested in my Signwritten "road map" of the piece of music. So, now she wants to know how long it takes to learn to read/write SW. So, if you encounter Shiner Antiorio among the Signwriters, you'll know that I sent her! Best of all, I met the composer of the piece herself, and asked if she would mind if I weren't able to sign *all* of the languages in the piece and substituted, say Gestuno for the Italian, etc. We had a very interesting discussion about performance, translation, and interpretation, then I went to rehearse and prepare for the performance. After the performance, she came up to me, and said that she would now like to add a link to www.signwriting.org to her own webpage, for the sake of other signed-language interpreters who would interpret this piece. Wow! We had fun at the performance itself. One wonderful thing about it was that we had an audience of 400 people, most of whom are familiar with the concept of ASL-interpreted choral concerts ... but many of whom had never seen two (or more) signers together jointly sign a piece. Brand-new concept to them, although Deaf people have done so for ages. It was an honor to get to be the one to introduce them to the concept! And so, here is a jpeg from that "road map" to show off, with the equivalents of "liberte", "Freiheit", "svoboda" (yes, it looks just like the ASL "freedom"! learned from Arkady Belezovsky), "chofesh" (a rabbi from Florida taught me this Israeli sign), and finally, the Gestuno. Yes, I ordinarily write vertically, not horizontally, but I find that sometimes writing horizontally makes it easier to integrate SW into a musical score. Am still figuring out the best way to do that. Hope all the US signwriters had a very happy 4th of July! Mine obviously was. Best, Kim from Boston ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 2:54 PM Subject: To: [log in to unmask] liberte, freiheit ... This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless! To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture. Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTimeŽ 6.5 or higher is required.