I recently got off the phone with Bob and a very alpha version of assignment 16. I was pointing out some questions I had, and what the braille simulated print of the lesson was showing me. In this context, one of the items he was asking what it was. I looked in the braille, and sure enough, the simulated braille shows in assignment 16 Greek! There are several portions where Greek is used, and Braille 2000 and its Greek is greek to it.
The only fix is to write it in braille, I.E. 6-key entry.
Now, I realize that my grumblings of 6-key and what a waste of time it is, proves to be very valuable.
Here is what I plan to do to fix the horid importation from the PDF to RTF file.
- Go in to Speech, engine settings, and turn on keyboard feedback.
- Fix the file up by deleting the old material that doesn’t need to be there and typing by hand the greek that it didn’t understand.
- Putting in some script signs which were not properly put in place.
- Fixing item 23 in spots where it was completely and utterly wrong.
I’ve been griping about the lesson material and the teaching of such material before, but I think that this has to be the worst piece of material that ever crossed my desk. I can’t fathom what the powers that be who developed this did a piss-poor job on the material and how correcting some aspects in RTF fixed some of it, but yet, we still have to correct quite a number of things that are completely wrong!
I know, I know, those of you who are reading this will say “This is the job of the transcriber. The software is not going to be perfect.” I get it. If the print is done correctly, and the software is trained how to back translate it, it should not have any problems.
In two of the numbers, it didn’t put a closing mark, it put a dot pattern that I’m not familiar with. The dot pattern is (dot 5 2) as a sequence at the end of the sentence. The elipses it put in place came from the print and was spaced, but braille doesn’t have that spacing so I can correct that and I do not fault the software for that.
My issues with assignment 13 are miniscule because I minipulated the RTF and got it wrong based on what I understood. Once I understood the correct method, I corrected it, and even learned how to correct it for the next RTF copy. Its all a learning process, and I do not blame software for something I did. All of the symbols except for the special symbol (shape indicator emoticon) aspect was done correctly. Once I corrected the emoticon special symbol shape, it was fine although it might not have backtranslated that correctly in to ledgable print.
I definitely know that I need to do some serious work at some point, and I know its going to have to be soon.
Have any of you done foreign language, especially with tools like Duxbury or any other piece of software and what did you think? Did it do an adequate job or did you have to correct it with the knowledge that you have on the subject?
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