How to handle abbreviations and names/words from other language

Common Voice
#1

Hi!

I often stumble across two problems:

  1. Abbreviations: “etc.” is spoken “e-tee-see” (letter by letter), how do I handle it when I find one in a sentence I want to speak? Report it as unspeakable? And when I check other peoples sentences? Click “No”?

  2. For example there is a french name in an english sentence. I think, If I speak it french it does not belong into the english datas. If I am using “Google” in a german voice recognition software I would expect something like “Guhgel” on the screen. Should I report those sentences when I want to record them? And what to do when I check those ones?

  3. In germany we use many words from other languages, mainly english. For example all the computer stuff is english, most people don’t know a german word for “mouse” or "joystick, I guess. So they kinda belong to the german language, but they are english words and spoken english. I guess it is similar in many other languages. How should I handle these ones?

I looked around for some wiki/faq or similar, but didn’t find those informations. :frowning:

Thanks in advance!

#2

We’re trying to avoid having abbreviations in the sentences, but we probably can’t fully avoid it. That also goes for older sentences. I’d say if it’s pronounced correctly it’s ok, if not I’d say “no” is the right choice.

Maus? :wink: I’d say as long as they are reasonably pronounced, it’s valid. I personally wouldn’t expect a perfect English accent.

I don’t have an opinion for the second point.

#3

My criteria for filtering the English wiki was if the foreign word was likely to be in reasonable usage by English speakers.

So “cul-de-sac” and “coup d’etat” are ok, as are country and well-known city names. I tried to filter out people’s names and obscure regional names, as well as sentences like “The Dutch word _____ means ____.”

2 Likes
#4

I was thinking about this yesterday and thought it ought to be pretty easy to take each candidate sentence, make a list of all words that don’t start with a capital letter (aren’t proper nouns), check to see if they’re in the English dictionary, and if any non-capitalized, non-English words exist in the sentence then reject it as too foreign. I think the same would apply to most other European languages, but I’m basically monolingual so :man_shrugging: