A general approach to TTS reading of mixed-language texts

The paper presents the Loquendo TTS approach to mixedlanguage speech synthesis, offering a range of options to face the various situations where texts may occur in different languages or embedding foreign phrases. The most challenging target is to make a monolingual TTS voice read a foreign language text. The adopted Foreign Pronunciation Strategy here discussed allows mixing phonetic transcriptions of different languages, relying on a Phoneme Mapping algorithm making foreign phoneme sequences pronounceable by monolingual voices. The algorithm extends previous solutions, obtaining a plausible approximated pronunciation. The method is efficient, language independent, entirely phonetics-based and it enables any Loquendo TTS voice to speak all the languages provided by the system.