Re: DECtalk driver and french language

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Hi Nath:

Adding another language to gnopernicus' speech is something we would 
like to do. I don't see any significant issues with gnome-speech, though 
there are a couple of issues with multi-language use in gnopernicus.

I am cc-ing gnome-i18n gnome org because whatever we do in this area 
needs to be coordinated with the existing GNOME internationalization 
framework. We don't want to come up with something totally nonstandard.

I forsee the need to do four things in order to make sensible use of 
multi-language speech in gnopernicus:

(1) gnome-speech needs to standardize its "LANG" property so that the 
languages which can be spoken by a given "Speaker" can be determined. In 
gnome-speech 0.2 I believe that, although the 'parameters' are all 
numeric values, they may be enumerations 
(GNOME_Speech_Parameter.enumerated == true) and in such cases you can 
call GNOME_Speech_Speaker_getParameterValueDescription() to get a string 
containing, for instance, "en_UK" or "fr".

(2) gnopernicus needs to select an appropriate Speaker based on the LANG 
currently being used. This may be difficult since currently gnopernicus 
associated speakers with different types of spoken output; probably 
making this work for multi-language cases will require a revision of the 
way gnopernicus chooses its voices.

(3) gnopernicus must, in order to do this, pay attention not only to its 
own current locale (for the 'default' LANG value), but listen for the 
<lang> text attribute and change speakers accordingly. In practice we 
don't have too many examples of this yet, but we expect to have more 
language tagging in the future. I think we get <lang> tags in our 
AccessibleText already if the text comes from a pango layout that uses 
something other than the application's default locale, but this hasn't 
been tested yet.

(4) eventually we'll need to provide a means for gnopernicus to 
determine the locale/lang of the applications which it's interacting 
with; we think we know how to do this now (via window manager properties 
_WM_LANG) but it's not implemented yet.

If what you want to do is change the speaker used for the whole desktop 
then you can do this with no problem, and I think that fairly 
straightforward changes to gnopernicus would allow you to select a 
Speaker appropriate to the locale that gnopernicus is running in. But if 
different text sources are in different languages, gnopernicus will need 
to start looking at language tags in its text stream and selecting 
speakers accordingly.

I think that it may be worth extending the gnome-speech parameter API 
slightly to make language-capability queries a little easier.

Since neither Marc nor I are bilingual (though I can almost understand a 
little en Franc,ais), perhaps you should be the pioneer here :-) Would 
you be interested in tracking this with Marc and the 
internationalization folks within Gnome?

best regards,

Bill


regards,

Bill

Nath wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> In Gnopernicus I switched to the DECtalk driver and it works but now I
> would like to add french language. do you think it will be possible
> easily or does it require a lot of modifications in the gnome-speech
> source code ?
> To give you an idea : In order to add french capabilities to the DECtalk
> software fonix send us an additionnal tar.gz file containing the
> following files :
> - libtts_fr.so (which is in /usr/local/lib)
> - dtalk_fr.dic (which is in /usr/local/lib/DECtalk)
>
> So if you have an idea about how to do in order that gnome-speech
> considers these files ? It will be very very nice for french users !
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
>
>
>