Re: Handling phonetic/military spelling

[F Wolff <friedel translate org za>]

On Di, 2007-04-10 at 18:34 -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
> 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

This is a very interesting localisation problem. I don't necessarily
have extra answers, but I'm wondering bout one issue that affects many
languages: diacritics. I have no idea how this affects military style
spelling. In normal speech we talk about "kappie-E" (hat E) for �for
example.

Friedel