On 23/12/2021 00:21, Don Y wrote:> On 12/22/2021 10:15 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote: >> On a sunny day (Wed, 22 Dec 2021 09:30:43 -0700) it happened Don Y >> <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote in <spvjrv$tj1$1@dont-email.me>: >> >>> It would be a tough call to determine if American English had evolved >>> more >>> OR LESS than the original British. I've read that American English >>> is, in >>> many ways, truer to its British roots than modern British English. >>> >>> Pronunciations also evolve, over time. As well as speech patterns. >>> >>> E.g., I was taught "the" should be pronounced as "thee" when preceding >>> a word beginning with a vowel sound: "Thee English", "Thee other guy" >>> but with a schwa ahead of a consonant: "The next one", "the Frenchman". >>> This seems to no longer be the norm. >>> >>> [You're interested in these sorts of things when you design a >>> speech synthesizer; the different "wh" sounds, etc.] >>[snip]>> I find the quality better than other things I have tried. >> >> All Linux of course > > There are lots of synthesizers out there -- FOSS as well as commercial. > But, those that run on a PC tend to be bloated implementations -- large > dictionaries, unit databases, etc. And, require a fair bit of CPU > to deliver speech in real-time. If you're trying to run in a small > footprint consuming very little "energy" (think tiny battery), there > really isn't much choice -- esp if you want to be able to tweek the voice > to suit the listeners' preferences (with unconstrained vocabulary) > > And, all suffer from requiring some level of smarts at the application > level. Feed it "Blue orange dog cat run" or "Mr Mxyzptlk" or even > something as bland as "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" and they yield > results that are unfathomable -- without *looking* at the source text > to try to suss-out what they are *trying* to say.Place names with irregular pronunciation or including words that synthesizers think they know tend to catch out even the most sophisticated voice synthesisers. Alexa can't manage for example Tyne & Wear (tine and weir), dialect Chop Gate (chop yat) and Cholmondeley (Chumlee) catch out most non-native English speakers in fact most non-locals. For that reason the latter was a location for sensitive military intelligence during WWII. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholmondeley,_Cheshire#Cholmondeley_Castle_and_Park -- Regards, Martin Brown
Translation services/strategies/costs
Started by ●December 22, 2021
Reply by ●December 23, 20212021-12-23
Reply by ●December 23, 20212021-12-23
On 23/12/2021 01:27, Don Y wrote:> On 12/22/2021 1:20 PM, Joe Gwinn wrote: >> On Wed, 22 Dec 2021 01:02:44 -0700, Don Y >> <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote: >> >>> I'm looking for folks who've first hand experience having >>> documents translated into foreign languages. Said documents >>> to include diagrams (think: callouts, legends), #included >>> text, etc. >>> >>> I've a fair bit of experience with I18N/L10N for software >>> but the extent of the effort, there, is usually fairly limited. >>> And, there's less of a need for a cohesive approach as the >>> interactions are "punctuated" (no pun intended). >>> >>> Recommendations for firms to do this? (no, finding multilingual >>> "friends" to do same is far too unprofessional -- though they may >>> have value in proofing the results) I suspect there is some >>> value in having a single firm handle all of the translations >>> (in the hope that they will create a consistent SET of >>> translations, even if different individuals are involved for >>> each) >>> >>> Relative effort? (i.e., closer to reading speed or writing speed?) >> >> Writing speed. Fluency in the technical domain, plus native fluency in >> the target language, are both necessary. > > So, you are assuming there is no learning curve for the material? > Or, that the original author is conveniently available (and > communicative with translator) to resolve those issues as > they manifest? > >>> Time frame? (is this effort-bound or business-bound) >>> >>> Cost? (and, "unit of measure"?) >> >> Slow and expensive. > > But what is the unit of measure? Page? Job? How does it > scale? (e.g., if you bundle two 50 page documents together, > do you see a better price than if kept separate? Or, vs. > a 100pp document?)There is a fixed cost per job plus some per page or thousand words depending on who you go to.> >>> Finally, how to check the translation for accuracy and "feel" >>> (i.e., ensuring it is true to the original intent)? >> >> Always need a proof reader and a tech editor in the target language; >> need not be capable of translation. > > So, you have to ensure both the translator and the proofreader > comprehend the material (and presentation).The translator doesn't necessarily need to fully understand the technical stuff provided they can interact with someone who does.>>> With translations in hand, do you (thereafter) maintain >>> individual documents? Or, merge them into a conditional >>> document? >> Same as for the original document, but in versions. With luck, the >> drawings are in common. > > So, you're suggesting *different* documents (for each translation)?Absolutely. There are horror stories of incompetent global edits being made to documents containing hybrid mixed languages. Word collisions in different languages are rare but not rare enough. Have a script to merge them prior to publication/typesetting.>>> Horror stories of attempts gone horribly wrong (i.e., what to >>> avoid)? > >> Well, you guessed it -- what had happened is that Swedish pronouns >> were all directly 2:1 mapped to the corresponding English pronoun, >> without recasting the sentences to remove the now massive ambiguities. > > So, this is a failure on the part of the translator(s). > And, likely, an "amateurish" oneSome languages have a lot more ambiguity than English and some are more precise with specific orders for words in a sentence.>> My advice to the President of the Danish firm was to have his >> engineers write the first draft in Danish, and hire a tech editor >> whose native language is English to make the translation and perform >> the cleanup. The tech writer was allowed to question the engineers >> until the editor understood, so the editor in effect stood in for the >> English-speaking customer audience. This was done. I did a full >> tech-edit scan of the result, and it read very well, and was perfectly >> clear. Only needed to fix one usage problem. It still was not large >> enough to fully describe that product, but still this was great >> progress. > > I had an experience with a Japanese firm where the Japanese (vendor) > would simply (apparently!) update their existing documentation to reflect > my needs. This didn't instill confidence -- are they really changing > the product to meet those tighter specs? Or, just *claiming* to?The Japanese vendor may well have tightened the specification to meet what you had asked for or not. Hard to tell from your description. My boss could never get his head round the fact that in Japanese negotiations "yes" means little more than "I hear what you say". And if you were unable to measure the difference between the product before and after they "Improved" it then I think they have a point. -- Regards, Martin Brown
Reply by ●December 23, 20212021-12-23
On 22/12/2021 21:30, Don Y wrote:> On 12/22/2021 1:57 PM, Martin Brown wrote: >> On 22/12/2021 20:21, Don Y wrote: >> >> My wife's name contains phonemes that are all but impossible in >> Japanese and her transliterated name overflowed the bank card field >> allowed. > > Kalahari? :>Wi and Fo neither of which exist in the Japanese phonemes. Closest and not very close are Ui and Fuo> You don't have to veer far from the european languages to find > gotchas in translations, odd (mis?)spellings, etc. > > "Preservative" will raise eyebrows in french culture ("preservatif")Much like asking your American secretary if she has a rubber. (pencil eraser in British English) -- Regards, Martin Brown
Reply by ●December 23, 20212021-12-23
On 12/23/2021 2:39 AM, Martin Brown wrote:>> There are lots of synthesizers out there -- FOSS as well as commercial. >> But, those that run on a PC tend to be bloated implementations -- large >> dictionaries, unit databases, etc. And, require a fair bit of CPU >> to deliver speech in real-time. If you're trying to run in a small >> footprint consuming very little "energy" (think tiny battery), there >> really isn't much choice -- esp if you want to be able to tweek the voice >> to suit the listeners' preferences (with unconstrained vocabulary) >> >> And, all suffer from requiring some level of smarts at the application >> level. Feed it "Blue orange dog cat run" or "Mr Mxyzptlk" or even >> something as bland as "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" and they yield >> results that are unfathomable -- without *looking* at the source text >> to try to suss-out what they are *trying* to say. > > Place names with irregular pronunciation or including words that synthesizers > think they know tend to catch out even the most sophisticated voice synthesisers.Yes, but all bets are off with place names, proper nouns, etc. as they have too many cross-language/cultural issues. I have relatives whose *first* names I couldn't begin to spell! The bigger problem is that "text" tends to have lots of assumptions as to the intended reader. You'd likely have no problem sussing out: Service temporarily suspended 12Dec2021. Please use bkupsrvr.dom.org. Contact Dr Frank N. Stein at x3-2001 or his sec'y at galfriday@here.com And, this is a relatively trivial "message". But, a synthesizer needs lots more information to convey this in a manner that doesn't have you pressing the "please-spell-for-me-that-which -you-are-trying-to-pronounce" button. And, trying to convey punctuation is a major chore (beyond *speaking* each symbol). As a result, the application has to integrate with the synthesizer instead of treating it as a "bolt on" output modality. [And, lets not even try to address spelling errors! Should the synthesizer (or, some middleware?) try to determine the *intended* word and speak that, instead?]> Alexa can't manage for example Tyne & Wear (tine and weir), dialect > Chop Gate (chop yat) and Cholmondeley (Chumlee) catch out most non-native > English speakers in fact most non-locals. For that reason the latter was a > location for sensitive military intelligence during WWII.Worcester (WUSS-ter), Billerica (bill-RICK-a), Berlin (BURR-lin, not burr-LIN), etc. Or, words that folks often mispronounce (almond, salmon). I can identify folks who are from my home *town* (not "state"!) by their speech habits -- highly localized. A neighbor claimed her firstname to be "Lara" -- though she spelled it L-A-U-R-A ("Isn't that Laura??"). [BTW, I'm still waiting for a pointer to the code you want compiled...]
Reply by ●December 23, 20212021-12-23
On 2021-12-23 10:39, Martin Brown wrote: [...]> Cholmondeley (Chumlee) catch out most > non-native English speakers in fact most non-locals. [...]English is well known for its complete disconnect between pronunciation and spelling, but this is ridiculous. Jeroen Belleman
Reply by ●December 23, 20212021-12-23
On a sunny day (Wed, 22 Dec 2021 17:21:06 -0700) it happened Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote in <sq0fdu$gjc$1@dont-email.me>:>On 12/22/2021 10:15 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote: >> On a sunny day (Wed, 22 Dec 2021 09:30:43 -0700) it happened Don Y >> <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote in <spvjrv$tj1$1@dont-email.me>: >> >>> It would be a tough call to determine if American English had evolved more >>> OR LESS than the original British. I've read that American English is, in >>> many ways, truer to its British roots than modern British English. >>> >>> Pronunciations also evolve, over time. As well as speech patterns. >>> >>> E.g., I was taught "the" should be pronounced as "thee" when preceding >>> a word beginning with a vowel sound: "Thee English", "Thee other guy" >>> but with a schwa ahead of a consonant: "The next one", "the Frenchman". >>> This seems to no longer be the norm. >>> >>> [You're interested in these sorts of things when you design a >>> speech synthesizer; the different "wh" sounds, etc.] >> >> A pretty decent text to speech is google translate. >> >> This script, called gst2_en on my system, has a female talk in english: >> >> #!/bin/bash >> say() { local IFS=+;/usr/bin/mplayer -ao alsa -really-quiet -noconsolecontrols >> "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=tw-ob&q=$*&tl=en"; } >> say $* >> >> >> >> You call it like this (with your text as example): >> gst2_en ">E.g., I was taught "the" should be pronounced as "thee" when preceding" >> >> In the script the &tl=en can be changed for the language you want, so &tl=nl for Dutch and &tl=de for German. >> >> If you want the output to go to a mp3 file then use mplayer -dumpstream in that script. >> >> I find the quality better than other things I have tried. >> >> All Linux of course > >There are lots of synthesizers out there -- FOSS as well as commercial. >But, those that run on a PC tend to be bloated implementations -- large >dictionaries, unit databases, etc. And, require a fair bit of CPU >to deliver speech in real-time. If you're trying to run in a small >footprint consuming very little "energy" (think tiny battery), there >really isn't much choice -- esp if you want to be able to tweek the voice >to suit the listeners' preferences (with unconstrained vocabulary) > >And, all suffer from requiring some level of smarts at the application >level. Feed it "Blue orange dog cat run" or "Mr Mxyzptlk" or even >something as bland as "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" and they yield >results that are unfathomable -- without *looking* at the source text >to try to suss-out what they are *trying* to say.Sure But the advantge of this script is that it uses NO resources on the PC / raspi or whatever but it does need a net connection, but mp3s are small. [B Here is an other one using google translate: #/bin/bash echo "english text document to audio or to mp3" echo "Usage: gst6_en filename.txt [1]" echo "if second argument present output to mp3 file, one mp3 file per line, else to audio" input=$1 lines=1 while IFS= read -r line do echo "line $lines" if [ "$2" == "" ] then /usr/bin/mplayer -ao alsa -really-quiet -noconsolecontrols "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=tw-ob&q=$line&tl=en"; else wget -O $1_$lines.mp3 "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=tw-ob&q=$line&tl=en" fi let lines=lines+1 done < $1 So this will speak a whole english text file line by line or, if you call it with an extra argument, make numbered mp3 files from a text file, one per line. You can then play the numbered mp3 files in [any] sequence with a similar script, and even edit and add comments by adding extra lines or deleting lines. Was just a quick hack.... OTOH I have 'festival' speech synthesizer on the PC for 20 years or so, not that bad either.
Reply by ●December 23, 20212021-12-23
On 23/12/21 11:23, Jeroen Belleman wrote:> On 2021-12-23 10:39, Martin Brown wrote: > [...] >> Cholmondeley (Chumlee) catch out most >> non-native English speakers in fact most non-locals. [...] > > English is well known for its complete disconnect between > pronunciation and spelling, but this is ridiculous.How do you pronounce "invalid"; there are two in common everyday speech! Then there's Featherstonehaugh (Fanshaw), Alnwick (Annick), Cirencester (Sissiter), Almondsbury (Almsbury), Leicester (Lester), Congresbury (Coonsbury), and many more. I suppose I ought to trot out this old chestnut again (complete with a bang address path!)... From raymond@pepto-bismol.berkeley.edu Wed Dec 19 09:50:07 1990 Date: Wed, 19 Dec 1990 09:50:07 GMT Date-Received: Wed, 19 Dec 1990 13:17:32 GMT Subject: Pronunciation in the English language (How do you pronounce kilometer?) Message-ID: <1990Dec19.095007.11611@agate.berkeley.edu> Organization: U.C. Berkeley Path: otter!hpltoad!hpopd!hplabs!ucbvax!agate!pepto-bismol.berkeley.edu!raymond Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban Subject: English poem Multi-national personnel at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters near Paris found English to be an easy language ... until they tried to pronounce it. To help them discard an array of accents, the verses below were devised. After trying them, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months at hard labor to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself. ENGLISH IS TOUGH STUFF ====================== Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it's written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation's OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation -- think of Psyche! Is a paling stout and spikey? Won't it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It's a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough -- Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!! -- Author Unknown
Reply by ●December 23, 20212021-12-23
On 23/12/2021 12:23, Jeroen Belleman wrote:> On 2021-12-23 10:39, Martin Brown wrote: > [...] >> Cholmondeley (Chumlee) catch out most >> non-native English speakers in fact most non-locals. [...] > > English is well known for its complete disconnect between > pronunciation and spelling, but this is ridiculous. >It is not a "complete disconnect" - not by a long way. Despite some of the common oddities of spelling in English, and some particularly unusual cases, there are far worse languages. Look at verb endings in French - many different spellings have different meanings, but are pronounced the same. Mongolian and Gaelic have a very much bigger separation between the phonetic values of the written spellings and the actual pronunciation. And of course, there are regional dialects and local words and names that are often very different. These cause plenty of trouble for speech recognition systems: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8> I love watching Kevin Bridges on YouTube and watching the auto-generated captions completely fail to interpret his perfectly clear English with a Scottish accent.
Reply by ●December 23, 20212021-12-23
On 12/23/2021 2:52 AM, Martin Brown wrote:>> I had an experience with a Japanese firm where the Japanese (vendor) >> would simply (apparently!) update their existing documentation to reflect >> my needs. This didn't instill confidence -- are they really changing >> the product to meet those tighter specs? Or, just *claiming* to? > > The Japanese vendor may well have tightened the specification to meet what you > had asked for or not. Hard to tell from your description. My boss could never > get his head round the fact that in Japanese negotiations "yes" means little > more than "I hear what you say". > > And if you were unable to measure the difference between the product before and > after they "Improved" it then I think they have a point.It's a cultural difference. They were oriented towards giving us what we *wanted*... We would try to determine their *existing* "sweet spot" for production and use that to adjust our requirements. If it was acceptable to our design, then life was good. If not, we would see what THEIR cost would be to improving the specification/performance from that EXISTING sweet spot to a spot more in line with our needs. If the cost was prohibitive, then we have a problem and need to see how much we can fudge our requirements to meet their capabilities. They, OTOH, would aim to deliver a product that fit our stated goal and adjust their pricing to reflect the cost of doing so. Wonderful! But, we may decide our product isn't marketable at that new price point. You can get damn near *anything* you want, when you're buying in big quantities. But, that doesn't mean that there aren't some select things that are less expensive than others! "Tell us what you've *got*" vs. "Tell me what you *want*"
Reply by ●December 23, 20212021-12-23
On 12/23/2021 6:16 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:> On a sunny day (Wed, 22 Dec 2021 17:21:06 -0700) it happened Don Y > <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote in <sq0fdu$gjc$1@dont-email.me>: > >> On 12/22/2021 10:15 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote: >>> On a sunny day (Wed, 22 Dec 2021 09:30:43 -0700) it happened Don Y >>> <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote in <spvjrv$tj1$1@dont-email.me>: >>> >>>> It would be a tough call to determine if American English had evolved more >>>> OR LESS than the original British. I've read that American English is, in >>>> many ways, truer to its British roots than modern British English. >>>> >>>> Pronunciations also evolve, over time. As well as speech patterns. >>>> >>>> E.g., I was taught "the" should be pronounced as "thee" when preceding >>>> a word beginning with a vowel sound: "Thee English", "Thee other guy" >>>> but with a schwa ahead of a consonant: "The next one", "the Frenchman". >>>> This seems to no longer be the norm. >>>> >>>> [You're interested in these sorts of things when you design a >>>> speech synthesizer; the different "wh" sounds, etc.] >>> >>> A pretty decent text to speech is google translate. >>> >>> This script, called gst2_en on my system, has a female talk in english: >>> >>> #!/bin/bash >>> say() { local IFS=+;/usr/bin/mplayer -ao alsa -really-quiet -noconsolecontrols >>> "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=tw-ob&q=$*&tl=en"; } >>> say $* >>> >>> >>> >>> You call it like this (with your text as example): >>> gst2_en ">E.g., I was taught "the" should be pronounced as "thee" when preceding" >>> >>> In the script the &tl=en can be changed for the language you want, so &tl=nl for Dutch and &tl=de for German. >>> >>> If you want the output to go to a mp3 file then use mplayer -dumpstream in that script. >>> >>> I find the quality better than other things I have tried. >>> >>> All Linux of course >> >> There are lots of synthesizers out there -- FOSS as well as commercial. >> But, those that run on a PC tend to be bloated implementations -- large >> dictionaries, unit databases, etc. And, require a fair bit of CPU >> to deliver speech in real-time. If you're trying to run in a small >> footprint consuming very little "energy" (think tiny battery), there >> really isn't much choice -- esp if you want to be able to tweek the voice >> to suit the listeners' preferences (with unconstrained vocabulary) > > Sure > But the advantge of this script is that it uses NO resources on the PC / raspi or whateverOf course it uses resources! You need a network stack, the memory to handle the packets delivered across that connection, the memory to support the shell, the filesystem from which to load the script and other binaries, the kernel, etc. You just assume they cost nothing because they are already present in your implementation. Take a *bare* rPi and see how much you have to add to it to make it speak. *That* is the resource requirement. [No, I don't care if it can also serve up web pages or log errors to remote hosts or handle TELNET connections... I just want it to *speak*! You'll get no "credit" for supporting those other things.]> but it does need a net connection, but mp3s are small. > [B > Here is an other one using google translate: > > #/bin/bash > echo "english text document to audio or to mp3" > echo "Usage: gst6_en filename.txt [1]" > echo "if second argument present output to mp3 file, one mp3 file per line, else to audio" > input=$1 > lines=1 > while IFS= read -r line > do > echo "line $lines" > if [ "$2" == "" ] > then > /usr/bin/mplayer -ao alsa -really-quiet -noconsolecontrols "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=tw-ob&q=$line&tl=en"; > else > wget -O $1_$lines.mp3 "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&client=tw-ob&q=$line&tl=en" > fi > let lines=lines+1 > done < $1 > > So this will speak a whole english text file line by line or, if you call it with an extra argument, > make numbered mp3 files from a text file, one per line. > You can then play the numbered mp3 files in [any] sequence with a similar script, > and even edit and add comments by adding extra lines or deleting lines. > > Was just a quick hack.... > > OTOH I have 'festival' speech synthesizer on the PC for 20 years or so, not that bad either.Festival is a prime example of that bloat.
