[g-a-devel] Speech synthesis and i18n

[Samuel Thibault <samuel thibault ens-lyon org>]

Hello,

The short story is that I've noticed that some people on a french
mailing list would write "ubentu" instead of "ubuntu", and when actually
meeting them, I would hear them indeed say "ubentu" for the name of the
Ubuntu distribution instead of "oubounetou", just because they never
heard it correctly.

That actually leads me to a maybe-not-so-niche problem: some words,
although written the same throughout the world (GNU, Linux, Ubuntu, ...)
are usually not spoken the same in each country.  Sometimes people will
follow their native language pronunciation, sometimes they will use the
english pronunciation, etc.  Speech synthesis, however, always use the
native language pronunciation, which results to the story above.

The Orca screen reader has a pronunciation dictionnary that can be used
to fix that, but newcomers just don't already know the pronunciation :)
I'm thus wondering whether it should be pre-fed with some data that the
usual i18n translators would provide in the usual .po file.  Of course,
there should be a comment in the .po file explaining that, something
like:

#. Translators: this is the spoken word for Ubuntu, i.e. something that
#. will be spoken the way Ubuntu would be pronounced in your language.
msgid "Ubuntu"
msgstr "Oubounetou"

What do people think about that?

Samuel