[Tlhingan-hol] Forvo

[Philip Newton]

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Michael Roney, Jr. PKT
<nahqun at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just ran across http://www.forvo.com/languages/tlh/
>
> Forvo apparently has "All the words in the world. Pronounced."
>
> Anyone here working with them?

I've recorded some words in English and/or German.

If I recall correctly, it only lets you record words and rate existing
pronunciations in "your native language". Because nobody is natively
bilingual or multilingual and speaks two or more languages at a native
level.

If that's still the case, then people who want to record Klingon
pronunciations will have to list that as their native language and
can, henceforth, no longer record pronunciations for other languages.
Depending on whether you want to support Klingon or want to support
Forvo as a whole, this may be a hindrance or not.

They also seem to have little quality assurance, which - combined with
the bit where you can only rate pronunciations in your own language -
makes the situation for "minority" languages (with few Forvo speakers)
difficult, since their crowdsourced QA fails. I came across this, for
example, with Inuktitut, where a bunch of translations are by the same
speaker (who says they live in Svalbard/Jan Mayen)... and either they
have no idea how Inuktitut is really pronounced  or I have grossly
misunderstood the written descriptions I've read so far, and I'm
leaning toward the former. But I couldn't see a way for me to mark the
pronunciations as "bad".

So, Forvo can be useful, but its quality is mixed.

Cheers,
Philip
-- 
Philip Newton <philip.newton at gmail.com>