Handling phonetic/military spelling

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

In Orca, there is a feature to spell words out via speech synthesis. 
The options include just sending each character of a word to the speech 
synthesis engine as well as performing phonetic/military spelling.  The 
phonetic/military spelling substitutes a word for each letter.  For 
example "abc" becomes "alpha bravo charlie" in English.

We currently have the phonetic/military word substitutions for the 
letters a-z, and we handle this via a simple dictionary: the keys are 
the single characters and the values are the words.

I'm curious about a few things: what other languages support 
phonetic/military spelling?  Should we include their alphabet in a big 
dictionary?  Should we do something else to make this more flexible to 
allow translators to extend the military/phonetic alphabet to their 
language (if so, how would we do this)?

Thanks!

Will