Phil|Accent Trainer
Professor Profissional
Hebrew Text to Speech — Google Translate Versus Microsoft Translator
Google Translate does not provide audio for Hebrew. Microsoft Translator, in contrast, does. Microsoft’s audio seems reasonably accurate (for an electronic translator), although there are of course some mistakes. (Note that the written transliteration or romanization is absolute nonsense.) 

Certainly, it has no way of distinguishing between words spelled the same but pronounced differently (perhaps in the future it will use context), but it seems like it is useful for longer, less common words that only have one pronunciation.
Amazingly, it somehow badly mispronounced
אלייך
It did, however, do better with the Masoretic spelling:
אליך


In any case, there don’t seem to be any superior options (free or paid), and Microsoft Translator is free.

What do you all think?
14 de jan de 2018 01:28
Comentários · 4
1
Yeah, Valery, the "algorithm" doesn’t seem to understand context in Hebrew, so it cannot handle short words with multiple meanings / pronunciations. For example שם could be sam, sham, or shem. However, the longer, unambiguous words seem to be accurate. At least Microsoft is trying, unlike Google.
17 de janeiro de 2018
1

Hi, I didn't knew about Microsoft translator.

I tried it. It is not bad, but some pronunciations are wrong. For example I tried לוח אם ( Motherboard) and it is wrong pronunciation. But I think single words will be good.  

17 de janeiro de 2018
1
Great tips from Geri on the proper — and improper — use of electronic translation. As with any good tool, its effectiveness depends on how we use it. Like a hammer — a great workman can build a house, while I can perhaps manage to hang something on the wall :) Thanks, Geri, for also pointing out the way in which context recognition has improved recently.


´”Fortunately" my native language is Hebrew’ — Because English spelling is so logical ;)

To those who claim that Hebrew is written without vowels — that actually applies more to English, where the same vowel or even vowel combination is pronounced differently in different words: Tear / tear (teardrop versus ripping), read / read (past / present), though, plough, through, cough, thought…. Also, the same vowel may have different pronunciations. For example, the “A” has 7 or 8 possible pronunciations (Hebrew only has 5 vowels to choose from): Card, gate, bat, dare, any, tuba, walk, warm.
16 de janeiro de 2018
1

"Fortunately" my native language is Hebrew,
so on one hand nobody understands me when I'm abroad,
but on the other hand - I don't need neither Google nor Microsoft translators in order to know how to pronounce correctly specific words in Hebrew.. ;-)

I'm familiar only with Google Translator, and given the circumstances - it is doing quite a good job, though not absolutely accurate.

Some thumb rules I use:
1. Give the context and not a single word.

2. Try to translate from and to English (eg when I need to know how to say something in Spanish, I will try to write it in English and not in Hebrew).

3. Apply a double check: when I'm not sure about what I wrote in English, I ask it to translate it back to Hebrew.

Regarding 1 & 2: Once I wanted to know how to say "לפטר" in Spanish. The translator translated it as "fuego". Evidently it translated "לפטר" to "fire" and "fire" to "fuego".. If I had given the full context (לפטר עובד מהמפעל) or the word in English ("dismiss" doesn't have an ambiguity like "fire"), I would have avoided the incident..

The same thing happened to me with לבוש => Custom => aduana..

16 de janeiro de 2018