Hi Alex,
On Nov 11, 2008, at 2:26 PM, Alex Jurgensen wrote:
Hi,
Ester,
According to Apple, the VO voices in OS X are localized in eight
languages.
What I was trying to say in an earlier and more detailed post is that
you can use VoiceOver with the different localizations, but it doesn't
mean that you'll be able to understand spoken content in another
language with that voice. Yes, you can have Alex (or Bruce, or Fred,
or any of the Apple voices) start speaking for a different language
localization. But it will sound like an English speaker who has no
knowledge of how to speak that language, trying to pronounce
everything as though they were English words with an American stress
pattern.
If you want to get an idea of what this is like, go to Google
translate, translate a paragraph into another language that you know,
and let Alex read the text to you. It may not be so bad in Spanish.
But I guarantee that if you try this on a tonal language like Chinese,
even in one of the many romanized forms that try to approximate
pronunciation of words, or even using a fairly inflected language like
Russian, again using romanized equivalents, you will find it nearly
impossible to understand the speech, even if you speak that language
yourself.
Does this make more sense in conveying why Will is looking for
"Voices" in other languages? And the further you get from a language
group that shares common roots with English, the less intelligible
"Alex" is going to be. This is why some Infovox/iVox voices cost more
-- when you get past French, Italian, German, Spanish etc. to
Scandinavian languages or Turkish.
Cheers,
Esther
P.S. I'm not going to change the subject from "eloquence", although I
feel anything but eloquent right now. I don't seem to be able to
explain these distinctions.
Thanks for listening,
Alex,
On 11-Nov-08, at 3:57 PM, Esther wrote:
Hi All,
Will asked:
hang on
are you saying that if you just install the french OS spanish
chinese etc. you will get synthesizers from apple in thos
languages/
and Alex replied:
Hi,
Yes,
Thanks for listening,
Alex,
Apple does not supply voices for each of the languages it supports
in language localization. You have to purchase them from third
party sources as Will did. If anyone listened to the YouTube video
demoing the iPod Nano 4G spoken menus in French that Anne linked to
in one of the early posts about the Nano 4G, the person showing off
the Nano clearly stated (well, clearly stated in French) that to
activate this in French you had to install additional French voices
that were generally purchased from third-party vendors, since
VoiceOver only came with English voices.
Cheers,
Esther
