If you are interested in translating English texts into Cherokee or Cherokee texts into English, you might want to check out these files. They are called "Translation Memory" and "Glossary" files, and they are designed to work with a computer program called OmegaT. In this blog post, I will explain what these files are, how they can help you with your translations, and how you can use them with OmegaT.

A Translation Memory (TM) file is a collection of sentences or segments that have been translated before. For example, if you have a TM file for Cherokee and English, it will contain pairs of sentences in both languages that correspond to each other. A Glossary file is a list of words or terms that have a specific meaning or usage in a certain context. For example, if you have a Glossary file for Cherokee and English, it will contain pairs of words in both languages that are related to a certain topic or field.

Here I demonstrate how to take a public domain comic book, take a story from it, clean it up, and prepare it for re-lettering with Cherokee Syllabary using [GIMP] and [Inkscape].

The reason we want to do this instead of producing new content from scratch is to reduce the amount of labour from many months to only a day for the re-lettering process, once translation has been performed.

Cherokee Language Fonts

2023-05-01 Michael Conrad  2 minute read

Chung-deh Tien and Joseph Erb created many fantastic fonts for typesetting Cherokee Syllabary. As these fonts are very hard to find via Google search they have been collected here together in one place for ease of access. A download link has been provided for each font followed by a picture showing the font's appearance.

Another set of fonts to consider using are the GNU FreeFonts as they properly include italic and bold forms for each of the letters in fonts more suitable for book and ebook typesetting and also general documents. Most of the educational materials I've created (not including comics) are typeset in FreeSerif.

Cherokee Animal Names (IMS-Toucan TTS)

2022-06-25 Michael Conrad  1 minute read

Enough progress has been made on the Cherokee IMS-Toucan TTS project to start providing full sets of audio lesson material.

This audio is 100% computer generated audio. No humans were used in the making of these audio files.

Cherokee TTS Update 3 (IMS Toucan)

2022-06-25 Michael Conrad  4 minute read

I've continued working with using the IMS-Toucan to create a TTS for Cherokee. Much progress has been made and the system appears usable enough to go ahead and switch over to creating lesson audio. For those interested, I maintain a fork of the repo at Cherokee Language IMS-Toucan.

I've attached readings of The Wolf and the Crawdad, The Search Party, and The Turtle and the Rabbit from the book Cherokee Reference Grammar - Brad Montgomery-Anderson (2015) as well as readings of the Two Hunters story from the Cherokee English Dictionary.

Cherokee TTS Update #2 (IMS-Toucan)

2022-04-18 Michael Conrad  3 minute read

I've been working with using the IMS-Toucan to create a TTS for Cherokee. My previous attempts with the Tacotron model kept resulting in problematic models that had a tendency to "ramble" on with "mumblings" in a not entirely predictable fashion. I maintain a fork of the repo at Cherokee Language IMS-Toucan.

The results I've obtained from the IMS-Toucan FastSpeech2 model are much more reliable.

I've attached a copy of three different TTS voices reading the Two Hunters story from the C.E.D., pp354-355. Cherokee Dictionary

Cherokee Animal Names (TTS 1)

2021-05-29 Michael Conrad  2 minute read

Enough progress has been made on the Cherokee TTS project to provide a full set of audio only exercises.

This audio is 100% computer generated audio. No humans were used in the making of these audio files.

Cherokee TTS Volunteer Help Needed

2020-11-16 Michael Conrad  2 minute read

Your help reviewing Cherokee language audio is greatly needed.

As mentioned in a previous post [here], I've been working on getting a Cherokee TTS system operational. I now have initial output ready for a quality check review.

If you have at least some ear for the sounds of Cherokee either as a second language learner or you are a first language speaker your help would most definitely be appreciated.

Simply visit [Audio Quality Vote], login, review audio, and vote. That's it! Simple and easy! Nothing to download or install, it all happens in the browser.