Forum Discussion
Re: Using TTS to pronounce English words while speaking another language.
Hi ChrisPetrizz906!
Happy to share some insight on this!
When Articulate Localization is used to translate a Storyline course, with Text-to-Speech applied afterward, Storyline automatically uses a localized TTS engine (e.g. Danish). The voice synthesizer assumes all text in the narration field is in that target language. So when it encounters English words like "Measurement Solutions", it tries to pronounce them using Danish phonetics.
This is actually a limitation of the TTS provider itself, rather than Storyline. The engine cannot dynamically detect language per word. As a workaround, you may be able to use phonetic spelling to "trick" the Danish voice by rewriting English words phonetically as they would sound in Danish For example:
"Mesjermænt Soluushns"
Another option is to generate recurring English terms separately, then export and reuse them throughout the project. For terms like “Measurement Solutions,” create a single high-quality English TTS clip once and reuse it across slides/scenes when necessary. This can help ensure consistency and save some time.
I'll also open the floor to our community to share alternative design suggestions with you!
1 Reply
Thanks StevenBenassi . We are going down the path of asking our local validators to phonetically write out the English terms in their local language, and hoping the TTS will get it right based on that. Good suggestion.
As for generating the recurring terms separately, we still face the same challenge if the phonetic trick doesn't work. We are reluctant to try different voices, because then the English words would be in a different voice than the rest of the localized narration. But that may be the way we end up going.
Thanks again.
