Zanichelli Chooses Loquendo for English-Italian Dictionary

Zanichelli Editore, a leading Italian publishing house, and Loquendo announce the selection of Loquendo test-to-sppech (TTS) for the CD-ROM of the Zanichelli English-Italian Dictionary 2010 edition.

Founded in 1859, Zanichelli publishes more than 250 works each year for the academic world, including encyclopedias, atlases, and mono-lingual and translation dictionaries in many different languages.

Zanichelli's English-Italian Dictionary—known as ‘Il Ragazzini’—reflects the rapid developments taking place in the English language each year and the CD-ROM that accompanies the dictionary is an invaluable tool for students of both English and Italian, containing all the entries present in the printed version, but with an additional feature that allows users to listen to the correct pronunciation of all English words in the dictionary—via Loquendo TTS for new additions.

Previously, professional speakers were used for this purpose. Now, after months of intensive tests by British and Italian linguists, the synthetic speech technology developed by Loquendo has been selected for the CD-ROM version.

"We're proud that Loquendo TTS has been selected by Zanichelli, which has a long and illustrious history in Italy as one of the major publishing houses in the academic sector," says Davide Franco, CEO of Loquendo. "Our products are available in 26 languages, and it is in acknowledgement of the high quality of our speech technologies that Zanichelli has chosen Loquendo as a means for students to verify the correct pronunciation of dictionary entries."

"Students of English find the audio component of the Zanichelli CD-ROM an essential tool for improving their pronunciation as they learn new words and expressions," says Enrico Lanfranchi, head of the Zanichelli reference division.