Hi Scott,
As a follow-up to your question about the InfoVox/iVox voices from
Assistiveware, you asked:
Also just out of interest, if you purchase a multilingual voice for
example
polish or whatever language you choose, could you write in
english and
the
other language voice will then convert the english to say polish
or german
will it?
It would be kind of nice to be able to say type in english phrases
and
have
them translated to polish so I could then communicate with my
Grandma who
doesn't speak english all that well.
Is this possible or is there a program I could download that would
do
this?
You could run your text through the Google's Translate page, then read
the results with the Polish voice. Google Translate lets you
translate
either text you type or paste into the Original Text section of
their page,
or else,translate a web page whose URL address you supply.
You can bookmark the settings so that the default buttons are
automatically
set to translate from English to Polish like this:
http://translate.google.com/translate_t?sl=en&tl=pl
Then, if you had some English text you wanted to translate into
Polish, say
in a TextEdit document, you could select and copy it in TextEdit and
paste
it into the box for original text on the Google Translate web page.
So a sequence might run as follows. (Note: I'm going to assume that
you
have your cursor tracking set to Mouse Cursor Follows VoiceOver Cursor
in VoiceOver navigation, and I'll tell you what's different if you
don't use
this, after the description).
In TextEdit: Command+A then Command+C to select and copy your English
text
Command-tab and use your arrow keys to switch between TextEdit and
Safari. In the Google Translate page, use item chooser (VO-keys+I) to
select "Original Text" by typing "Or" and pressing enter. VO-keys
+right
arrow to the text area. Click with your mouse. This means, on a
laptop,
press the trackpad key. On a full keyboard, with NumPad Commander
turned on, you can press "5" on the Number Pad area.
Paste in your text with Command+V. VO-keys+right arrow past the popup
buttons for selecting/changing the language you translate "from" and
"to"
till you reach the translate button and press it with VO-keys+space.
To navigate to the translated text, use item chooser (VO-keys+I) and
type
"Pol" then arrow down to "Translation: English Polish" and press
enter.
VO-keys+down arrow to read the translated text.
When you listen to this in VoiceOver with one of the English-speaking
voices the accents and stresses are going to sound wrong. Well,
they'll
sound the way an English speaker would try to pronounce those
words based on the way that they're spelled, and with no knowledge
of Polish. But if you switched to the InfoVox Polish voice to read
the
translated text, it would sound like something your grandmother
could recognize.
If you don't have your mouse cursor set to track your VoiceOver
cursor,
then you need to route your mouse cursor to your VoiceOver cursor
before you "click" into the text box to either start typing or paste
in
your text. Use VO-keys+Command-F5 to route your mouse cursor to
your VoiceOver cursor. On older laptops you also press the FN key
with that combination. The key click must be a "real physical click"
on a mouse button or trackpad button, or with NumPad Commander's
"5" key, and it must be made with your mouse cursor positioned on
the text box. VO-space, VO-shift-space, etc. will not work. This is
true for other Safari web interactions (like bringing up a links
option
menu),
You can also change the translation "from" and "to" languages using
the popup buttons, but if you know that you want to make English
to Polish your default translation setting, just bookmark the URL
of the page after you've run a translation (with Command-D).
The easy way to use the bookmark (if you think you will make
frequent use of this page) is to save the bookmark to your Bookmarks
Bar folder. The first 9 bookmarks in the Bookmarks bar folder are
assigned shortcuts keys (Command-1, Command-2, etc.) in
Safari. Normally, we leave the Bookmarks bar hidden, so these
items don't show up in addition when we use the item chooser or
links chooser menu, but you can toggle the Bookmarks bar on
and off with Command-Shift-B. The shortcut combination to go
to the first, second, etc. link on the Bookmarks bar works even if
the Bookmarks bar is hidden.
This was a fun question to answer, and may be of interest to the
other language buffs on the list (Simon?). Of course, the Google
Translate page is still only a machine translation effort, but it can
be quite useful.
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
On Friday, June 13, 2008, at 12:35PM, "Scott Rutkowski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
Yeh I understand it's a tts.
I was wondering if there is a translation package so if you had the
correct
voice installed for the language you wanted to translate to, is this
possible?
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Poehlman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac
OS Xby
theblind" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2008 8:10 AM
Subject: Re: Other voices for the mac
Infovox you can get as a demo for free and you can also get free
demos of
the voices. This is a tts, not a translation package so what you
put in
is
what it will try to give you back no matter what the voice
language is.
