Here is a speech sample from my translation extract of The Charterhouse of Palma.
It is created using Google Translate's speech synthesis option. It's using the Finnish voice, because the Finnish language had most of the phonemes that I needed and the orthography rules are very regular. If you write text the right way, you can force Google Translate's text-to-speech to say pretty much what you want. It does mean that the SinPlatt will have quite a Finnish accent.
“Ik pries de lüttele husar an,” riep de merketantin. “De junge bürger heft ene modig hert.” Korporal Aubry marschärde forbie uten seggen een word. Acht oder tejn soldaten liepen fort and kåmen med him toosamen. Hi leidede hin toorügg ene grote eek, umgegeven med dornen. Wan kam hi dår, hi settede hin fort de rand fan de busch, noch uten seggen een word, an ene wied gestrekkde front, eelke stond toomindest tejn schreden af siene nåjbuur.
Sellamat David !
ReplyDeleteWell, the bot speaks like "out of a syringe" and (without looking at the text), I understood nearly nothing, though I think a mixture of German and Dutch should be familiar to me. I think you should do the recording by yourself. A microphone for computer is cheap (some 13 € in France).
Yes, the sound quality has suffered a bit. It started out as a very high-quality recording. But converting it to a video took a toll. And uploading the video to Blogger did a second conversion which degraded the sound even further. What you're listening to is a copy of a copy of an artificial voice.
ReplyDeleteI've already got a good microphone. I may try recording my own voice, but that's actually less straight-forward than using text-to-speech. By it's nature, no-one on this planet is (yet) fluent in SinPlatt. A computer speech synthesizer at least makes no mistakes (if I program it correctly). But if I record my voice, my pronunciation is likely to be far from the my ideal. And I'll probably stumble on most sentences. It's scary just how difficult it is to SPEAK a language rather than write it, especially if you've never heard it spoken by real people. So I'll need to make multiple attempts and then edit it together.
I don't think so. If you invent an auxlang (not something like Klingon...), or at least a conlang based on Germanic languages, you should be able to speak it better than the bot. I actually made more than 40 Sambahsa recordings on Youtube and uploading does not alter the quality of the pronounciation nor adds a "syringe effect". (For pure technical problems like volume, I use Audacity, which is freely downloadable).
ReplyDeleteI've changed it to a YouTube video now, so the sound quality might have improved marginally.
ReplyDeleteI'll work on a real voice recording in the next few days.