[nvda] Re: strange pronunciation quirks

On 26/02/2009 4:01 PM, kendell clark wrote:
> Some of the novels I read have words in them

other than english, for example someone might say an expression in
spanish or french. The speech completely mangles the pronunciation to
where It's completely unintelligible. I use both eloquence and espeak
and neither one seems to get it right. Eloquence does a better job of
it. My question is, is this due to NVDA or simply due to the
synthesizer?
NVDA currently does not do any language detection or switching; it just sends the text to the synthesiser as is. For languages based on the Latin alphabet (e.g. English, Spanish, Italian, German and most other European languages), most synthesisers cannot distinguish between the language. I believe eSpeak and Eloquence both know how to switch between languages when dealing with languages that use entirely different characters; e.g. if eSpeak is set to use a Chinese language, it will speak English words as English.
Some web sites, etc. provide special markup which indicates what language a given piece of text is written in. We don't currently support this, but it is possible to switch languages when this information is encountered.
Aside from that, Aleksey SAdovoy has been talking talk about having NVDA automatically detect and switch languages. This will not be as successful for languages with similar characters, as differentiating between them is difficult, but it is interesting nevertheless. 

--
James Teh
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