OLPC Oceania/Languages

Oceania Community - News - Content - Evaluation - Languages - Countries
Cook Islands -French Polynesia - Kiribati - Nauru - New Caledonia - Niue - Palau - Papua New Guinea - Samoa- Solomon Islands - Tonga - Tokelau - Tuvalu - Vanuatu

Pootle Projects

• Solomon Islands Pidgin (Pijin)
  • Wikipedia link
• Marovo (Solomon Islands)
  • Wikipedia link
• Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea)
• Nauruan (Nauru)
  • Wikipedia link

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Speak / Text to speech projects

OLPC Oceania is working with Michael Saunders, a British teacher living in Canada, who spent two years in the Solomon Islands in the late 1990s. Michael has worked with his technology students and a local Mohawk feeder school, and produced a Mohawk voice for Espeak, and implemented this on the XO. Instructions and language files can be downloaded below. The intention is now to develop espeak voices for the languages above. Michael found that the whole process of developing a new language for Speak can be carried out on the XO itself.

• Instructions for implementing a new language "voice" for Speak on the XO
• Download files for Mohawk (for illustration) including instructions

Temporary work-arounds for the Speak Activity with Pacific languages

We have discovered that the following Speak settings can be used for some Pacific languages

• Swahili gives an excellent pronunciation of Solomon Islands Pijin, and probably Tok Pisin. It also seems to work well for some native languages, at least far better than the default English. (My family have tried the Swahili setting for their own Rennell-Bellona language, a Polynesian language from southern Solomon Islands, and it works reasonably well - David Leeming)
• In Nauru, the German setting works better than English at pronouncing the written language.