Hi Will,
The main thing to do is to translate the character into the word(s) that a native speaker of the language would choose. IMO, if the TTS engine has pronunciation problems for words, the TTS engine should be fixed rather than trying to accommodate its shortcomings in the client. One of the reasons for this is that there are a variety of TTS engines that can be used with Orca; accommodating the unique pronunciation characteristics of just one of these engines might end up having adverse effects on the other engines that get it right.
agree with you that the Orca translation must not depend on a specific speech engine. But the example I mentioned is from my point of view not a specific problem of the espeak engine that I use; it is more the question if the speech engine supports more than one language and recognizes a english word even in a german text: The symbol » « represents the english word »at«. In German this is not translated but the majority just uses the English word »at«. If I send »at« to the espeak engine using the german voice it pronounces »at« like a german word which sounds quite unfamiliar. I don't know if other speech synthesizers can do this better. There are only few strings (maybe 5-7) which should remain in English (Although the use anglicisms become more and more popular in Germany the GNOME Translation Team tries to avoid English words and to use German words only). In these few cases I had the idea to »translate« the words into a kind of pronunciation for Germans of these english words. It's not that specific for the espeak engine and I would espect other engines that support German would pronounce these words quite english as well. I hope that I was somehow able to explain the problem and my idea. Of course, I can leave the strings in english if you like and if other engines can handle this better than espeak. Please let me know. Thanks, Jochen -- Jochen Skulj http://www.jochenskulj.de GPG Key-ID: 0x37B2F0B8 Finger Print: F239 5D8D 97CD F91F 9D08 AE94 AA3B 1ED5 37B2 F0B8
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