[nvda] Re: strange pronunciation quirks

This is always going to be a problem. Indeed you have supplied the reason in your question. In order to use other languages, a synth needs to know the rules of the language. Thus, without some way to know how to switch from, say English to Spanish, it can never know it should do so. To be able to achieve this it would need a marker in the text even if the synth had such a detector, who is going to go through novels and add the characters? To be inteligent enough to change rules on the fly, presumably would be an immense job and very much a processor time eater. When I get my second hand Cray 10, I'll try it... Serously, I think in the main you are stuck with it. I notice that Hal, for example has a hotkey to sequence around different languages, so I guess you could stop reading, cursor back, switch the language, and read the words, then switch the language back again.
Is it really worth it. If you were a translator though, I'd imagine such a facility would be very handy.
To tak it one stage further, would you expect Windows keyboard to be changed and the spelling language to alter on every foreign phrase? 

Brian
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----- Original Message ----- From: "kendell clark" <coffeekingms@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009 6:01 AM
Subject: [nvda] strange pronunciation quirks


Hello all:
I have a couple of questions. I read a lot of novels in my spare time, particularly clive cussler. 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? I've tried fixing the words in the speech dictionary but either the pronunciation is wrong or the stress is placed at the wrong parts I can't seem to get it right. I'll give an example. baja tortilla. Eloquence mangles them completely and espeak pronounces them the same. I hope I don't sound like I'm complaining because I'm not, just curious how NVDA handles words written in another language. Does eloquence pronounce things the way the synthesizer is programmed to, or is nvda sending the text to it wrong? I have no idea how this is achieved so I hope I make sense. When I try to fix the example I get bahha torteea, and it doesn't sound right. There are others but I don't want to make a list. 
Thanks for any help
Kendell clark



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