Hi,
I was going to reply to Donna off list and suggest that she check the
wikipedia. The more elegant way to do this is to use the Wikipanion
app from your iPhone or iPod Touch (under iOS 4 with language rotor).
It will take you to the regular Wikipedia app entry, but your iPhone
will read out the bits with Chinese characters in Mandarin. (At
least, it does on my iPod Touch). The answer in the Wikipedia entry
is that there is a system that is based on Pinyin entry for initial
sound and final sounds, with some ability to indicate 4 tones.
However, there is a section that describes "Ambiguity and future of
Chinese Braille" which addresses the issue of the different phonetic
representations of words.
The issue of Chinese input methods for VoiceOver users came up on the
viphone list. If you're interested, see my (long) post titled,
"Chinese Input with VoiceOver on the iPhone [was Re: Chinese VO]" that
replied to a question/complaint from an iPhone user about the
inability of entering Chinese text on the iPhone. (This was posted a
few days after iOS 4 with access to the language rotor was released):
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg24706.html
You're actually better off going to the viphone list and searching for
the thread Alvin started and his later followup in another thread, but
the issue of how to input Chinese text with VoiceOver (if we ever get
voices for that work with VoiceOver on the Mac) is a real one for this
list. Incidentally, for U.S. and Canadian iPhone users, it's possible
to use the Trippo VoiceMagix app (or the newer version Trippo Voice
Translator Plus, which gives you a free app and lets you add on the
voice recognition and text to speech features through in-app purchase,
to get the same thing). To speak in English and have the translated
text spoken (and written) in Chinese, which you could then copy and
edit. And since I wrote the linked post, Sonico GmbH has added a
Loquendo Chinese text-to-speech voice for in-app purchase in their
iTranslate (free) and iTranslate Plus ($0.99, saves history of
previous entries) apps for $1.99. (Their male Russian voice is also
very good.)
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On Oct 25, 2010, at 08:00, Colin M wrote:
Hi all!
I was a bit curious myself, there is info about Chinese braille on
wikkipedia!
So it does indeed exist and has been around a while!
Just type chinese braille into google and it should be the first
option, if you want to have an gander!
Colin
On 25 Oct 2010, at 18:43, Scott Granados wrote:
Wow that must be a complex braille implementation. I've seen a
Japanese and Chinese typewriter and it's a similar situation with
hundreds of keys.
On Oct 25, 2010, at 8:42 AM, Donna Goodin wrote:
Sorry for the ot post, but this is such an international list, I
figured someone would know the answer.
I'm sitting here having a discussion about chinese braille with a
colleague. Does anyone know anything about it? Does it exist?
If yes, how does it work? My colleague--who speaks Chinese was
explaining that it couldn't just rely on a phonetic symbol system,
because the same phonetic writing can represent several different
words.
Since this is not on topic, feel free to respond off-list, [email protected]
.
Donna
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