We propose several tracking adaptation approaches to recover from early tracking errors in sign language recognition by optimizing the obtained tracking paths w.r.t. to the hypothesized word sequences of an automatic sign language recognition system. Hand or head tracking is usually only optimized according to a tracking criterion. As a consequence, methods which depend on accurate detection and tracking of body parts lead to recognition errors in gesture and sign language processing. We analyze an integrated tracking and recognition approach addressing these problems and propose approximation approaches over multiple hand hypotheses to ease the time complexity of the integrated approach. Most state-of-the-art systems consider tracking as a preprocessing feature extraction part. Experiments on a publicly available benchmark database show that the proposed methods strongly improve the recognition accuracy of the system.