Symbol names always sent as English strings

[Kyle]

I have tried both espeak-ng and MBROLA speech synthesizers in Brazilian 
Portuguese, as well as espeak-ng in Swahili. I have turned off symbol 
preprocessing explicitly in /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf. In all cases, 
speech-dispatcher seems to be ignoring this setting, as I always hear the 
speech 
synthesizer's best attempts to pronounce English names for symbols, i.e. 
non-alphanumeric characters. For example, if I type a * (star) character, and 
my 
speech-dispatcher character is set to pt-br, the Portuguese speech pronounces 
the character as "istar" instead of "asterisko," which is the Portuguese 
pronunciation as given when I pass the character directly to espeak-ng or 
MBROLA.. It's the same of all other non-alphanumeric characters. Is there some 
other way other than turning off DefaultSymbolsPreprocessing explicitly to 
force 
speech-dispatcher to send symbols directly to the speech synthesizer instead of 
sending it English strings? Thanks much for any help.
~Kyle