RE: [kidsgames] Word

["Brian Thompson" <briandthompson@home.com>]

Thank you, I understand. What about at a spelling or picture association
level though?

>
> I would be very nervous of any sort of automatic translation in a TEACHING
> setting.  The state-of-the-art for automatic translation is nowhere near
> good enough to teach children without also teaching them the errors that
> the translator makes. Go to the 'BabelFish' site (which does automatic
> translation) and type in the US national anthem.  Translate it to
> any other language and back again.  "The Stars and Stripes Forever"
> translated to French and back comes out as "The Asterisks and strips for
> a long time".   :-)
>
> There are newer tools that are reputed to do a better job than Babelfish,
> and translating a document twice is magnifying the error - but still, I
> don't think you should rely on them for a children's package.
>
> Also, if you are teaching non-native speakers of the language then I would
> certainly not use a phoneme based text-to-speech tool for much the same
> reason.  It's pronounciation of some words will certainly be incorrect
> because (at least in English) there are ASCII strings that must be
> pronounced differently depending on the context.
>
>   eg   BOW  -- Something used to shoot an arrow.
>        BOW  -- The sharp end of a ship.
>
> I work in Flight Simulation (which is training for pilots - and hence
> a teaching environment) - one of our cardinal rules is to avoid "Negative
> Training" - and I think the same thing must apply to children's programs.
>
> --
> Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
> sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
> sjbaker@hti.com      (work)
>
>
>

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