Spanglish

[Martin J. Dürst]

Hello Luc, others,

On 2017/01/06 04:58, Luc Pardon wrote:

>   My comments are mostly made with one particular but very important use
> case in mind, and that is: text-to-speech engines, such as screen
> readers for the blind.

>   1. Both can - and must - be handled by fine-grained tagging, down to
> the individual word level if needed.
>
>   The "must" is because in both cases, the words tend to be pronounced
> as they are in the original language. That is certainly so in books with
> parallel text, and it seems to be the case with (most?) hybrids as well.
> With Spanglish, the Spanish words are pronounced in the Spanish way, and
> the English ones in the English way. At least that is my understanding.
>
>   Without help from word-level tags, current text-to-speech engines will
> pronounce everything as if it were English (in case the tag en-t-h0-es
> is used) or Spanish (es-t-h0-en). This will make the text difficult to
> understand (if not utterly incomprehensible) to a blind Spanglish speaker.

Wouldn't it be possible to create a text-to-speech engine that e.g. uses 
an English dictionary for pronouncing words that occur in English, and 
then a Spanish dictionary for words that aren't found in the English 
dictionary? I don't think such a thing exists, but it wouldn't be too 
hard to create if the pieces are available. Of course, there are some 
words (spellings) that appear in both languages, so they might still 
need fine-grained tagging.

Regards,   Martin.