Re: Handling phonetic/military spelling

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hey All:

As an alternative representation, how about the following.  This allows 
a translator to more easily extend/modify the alphabet and phonetic 
words to match their language:

"{'a': 'alpha', 'b': 'bravo', 'c': 'charlie', 'd': 'delta', 'e': 'echo', 
'f': 'foxtrot', 'g': 'golf', 'h': 'hotel', 'i': 'india', 'j': 'juliet', 
'k': 'kilo', 'l': 'lima', 'm': 'mike', 'n': 'november', 'o': 'oscar', 
'p': 'papa', 'q': 'quebec', 'r': 'romeo', 's': 'sierra', 't': 'tango', 
'u': 'uniform', 'v': 'victor', 'w': 'whiskey', 'x': 'xray', 'y': 
'yankee', 'z': 'zulu'}"

The note to translators would say something like:

Translators: this is a structure to assist in the generation of 
military-style spelling.  For example, 'abc' becomes 'alpha bravo 
charlie'.  It is a simple structure that consists of pairs of 'letter': 
'word(s)' separated by commas.  For example, we see 'c': 'charlie'.  The 
complete set should consist of all the letters from the alphabet for 
your language paired with the common military/phonetic word(s) used to 
describe that letter.  If more than one word is to be used, they should 
all be inside the single quotes (e.g., 'w': 'double bourbon').  Note 
that the form of this string is a programming language construct, so you 
need to get the syntax right.  If you want to test the syntax, 
build/install Orca and then type the following command in a terminal 
with the locale set to the locale you're translating to.  If no errors 
are emitted, you got it right:

python -c 'import orca.phonnames'

Will

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