Re: Handling phonetic/military spelling

[Christian Persch <chpe gnome org>]

Hi,

> Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 18:34 -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
> > 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)?

There is certainly a need to have this alphabet extensible per locale.
For example, the civil german phonetic alphabet has extra words for
«ch», «sch» and «ß». See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchstabiertafel
which is part of DIN 5009 (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_5009).
But extensibility itself isn't enough; translators need to be able to
translate the words themselves, since the civil phonetic alphabet will
have different words from the military one. See the wiki link above, and
for example bug #308452 which I filed against gnopernicus' german
translation because of that.

> The NATO phonetic alphabet is accepted throughout most
> of the world, at least for official military and radio
> communication. 

Accepted for miliary use, maybe. Acceptable for use in GNOME, no.

>  But as Leonardo pointed out, normal
> folks in some countries may be less familiar with it,
> even if it is used for official communications.
> 
> The Wikipedia entry
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
> has a few interesting tidbits about local conventions in
> the sections "Additions in German, Danish and Norwegian"
> and "Variants".

IMO, using a civil phonetic alphabet — if one exists for the language in
question — should always be preferred over the military phonetic
alphabet.

Regards,
	Christian