TRAFO: a multidialectal phonological transcriber for Spanish

Abstract

This paper presents TraFo, an automatic phonological transcriber of dialectal varieties of Spanish. While there exists a wide range of tools for automatic phonetic transcription of several languages (including Spanish), only very few tackle the issue of automatic transcription on the phonemic level, especially when it comes to considering dialectal phonological variation. TraFo is an online tool that generates grapheme-to-phoneme transcriptions of Spanish including dialectal features as “yeísmo” (i.e /ʎ/ ~ /ʝ/ merger into /ʝ/), “zheísmo” (i.e. /ʎ/ ~ /ʝ/ merger into /ʒ/), “sheísmo” (i.e. /ʎ/ ~ /ʝ/ merger into /ʃ/), “lleísmo” (i.e. absence of merger i.e. /ʎ/ ~ /ʝ/), “seseo” (i.e. /s/ ~ /θ/ merger into /s/), “ceceo” (i.e. /s/ ~ /θ/ merger into /θ/), and “distinguidor” (i.e. absence of /s/ ~ /θ/ merger). This set of parameters is sufficient to allow for the automatic phonological transcription of a wide range of Spanish varieties and can hence be used for teaching, (self-)learning, research and speech therapy in most Spanish-speaking areas.