SayMore Import of Audacity Track Label: Can we have it go to Free Translation

Good afternoon,
We have a project where transcription was done in the label track of Audacity. The labels are in English. When we import the label track into SayMore, it is imported into the Transcription field. We would like to have it imported into the Free Translation.

Is this possible?

I don’t think there is currently any way to control this from within SayMore. You could, of course, copy them over manually one by one. If there are a lot of them, it probably wouldn’t be too difficult for a reasonably skilled support person to move them over en masse by editing the files directly (after first making a reliable backup in case something goes wrong).

I agree that if there are multiple users, projects, locations where this is needed that it would be better to improve SayMore to be able to do it. As I understand it, I officially no longer have any of my time allocated to work on SayMore, so it might take some time to figure out who can/should do this.

Is SayMore supposed to populate the “Phrase Free Translation” Tier, even with null annotation value (<ANNOTATION_VALUE></ANNOTATION_VALUE>) when using the Read an Audacity Label file as the Segmentation Method of choice when we ‘start annotating’?

I’ve been trying to find ways to move information from the Transcription Tier into the Phrase Free Translation Tier, but am finding it a bit difficult as the Phrase Translation Tier is empty after beginning with the Read an Audacity Label file method. I do see that the Phrase Translation Tier is populated with null annotations (<ANNOTATION_VALUE></ANNOTATION_VALUE>) when we begin with the ‘Use auto segmenter’ method.

I’ve tried creating what should go in the Phrase Translation Tier, but SayMore doesn’t see it. And overwrites it anyway once someone adds anything into the Free Translation field.

I’ve started working on code changes to support your task. The small sticking point is that in SayMore’s world, the free translation tier is dependent on the transcription tier. So I think the answer is going to be to populate both tiers, but leave the transcription text blank.

I now have a proposed solution: Added option to import Audacity labels into free translation by tombogle · Pull Request #170 · sillsdev/saymore · GitHub
Hopefully @JohnHatton will be able to review the approach I took soon and either approve it or suggest a more elegant approach. (Or possibly argue that this is a bad idea.)

Thanks Tom. I think your proposed answer of populating both tiers but leaving transcription blank matches what happens when you use the auto segementor. In that instance it populates both tiers but leaves the annotation blank for both. Seems reasonable to me. Thank you for working on it.