[Marble-bugs] [Bug 280872] New: Voice navigation structure (concatenated phrases) does not support fenno-ugric languages, and likely many others too

[Otto Kekäläinen]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=280872

           Summary: Voice navigation structure (concatenated phrases) does
                    not support fenno-ugric languages, and likely many
                    others too
           Product: marble
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Unlisted Binaries
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: wishlist
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
        AssignedTo: marble-bugs at kde.org
        ReportedBy: otto.kekalainen at seravo.fi


Version:           unspecified (using KDE 4.6.5) 
OS:                Linux

I translated the voice file at
http://community.kde.org/Marble/VoiceOfMarble/Translations into Finnish and
recorded the finnish voice at Desktop Summit a few weeks back.

While doing it I noticed that the structure of the voice bits and stiching them
into sentences does not properly support the word grammar in fenno-ugric
languages, and probably many others (I'm not a linguistic).

The problem are the concatenated phrases (see bottom of
http://community.kde.org/Marble/VoiceOfMarble/Translations).

In English and other indo-european langauges it is OK to use individual words
in their basic form an join them to a sentence like "After 500 meters, turn
sharply left."

However in languages like Finnish, this sentence should be "500:n metrin
kuluttua, käänny tiukasti oikealle". So the word "after" should come after the
distance. Also the number is not in it's basic form, but a little bit
different.

Now the implementation in Finnish says "Jälkeen 500 metriä, käänny tiukasti
oikealle" which sounds wierd, but is better than nothing and can still only be
interpreted in only the correct way.

I don't know how to fix this. The same "bug" was in ispell library too, thus
hunspell library was later made to replace ispell for fenno-ugric (and other?)
languages. The current 64 recordings might need to be expanded.

Alternatively you could use espeak as the voice, and thus release yourself from
the strains of manually having to record and stitch bits of voice together.
"espeak --voices" lists support for 50+ languages, Finnish included.


Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
I filed this bug report as a reminder that something needs to be done if voice
navigation of Marble aspire to conqueror the world, in all languages.

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