@inproceedings{somers-etal-2006-developing,
    title = "Developing Speech Synthesis for Under-Resourced Languages by {\textquotedblleft}Faking it{\textquotedblright}: An Experiment with {S}omali",
    author = "Somers, Harold  and
      Evans, Gareth  and
      Mohamed, Zeinab",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Choukri, Khalid  and
      Gangemi, Aldo  and
      Maegaard, Bente  and
      Mariani, Joseph  and
      Odijk, Jan  and
      Tapias, Daniel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC}`06)",
    month = may,
    year = "2006",
    address = "Genoa, Italy",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/L06-1289/",
    abstract = "Speech synthesis or text-to-speech (TTS) systems are currently available for a number of the world`s major languages, but for thousands of other, unsupported, languages no such technology is available. While awaiting the development of such technology, we propose using an existing TTS system for a major language (the base language, BL) to ``fake'' TTS for an unsupported language (the target language, TL). This paper describes the factors which determine the choice of a suitable BL for a given TL, and describe an experiment with a fake Somali TTS system evaluated in the real-life situation of a doctor–patient dialogue. 28 Somali participants were asked to judge the comprehensibility of 25 short Somali sentences recorded with a German TTS system. Results suggest that ``faking it'' provides reasonable stop-gap TTS for unsupported languages."
}