The phonetization of text corpora requires a sequence of processing steps and resources in order to convert a normalized text in its constituent phones and then to directly exploit it by a given application. This paper presents a generic approach for text phonetization and concentrates on the aspects of phonetizing unknown words. This serves to develop a phonetizer in the context of forced-alignment application. The proposed approach is dictionary-based, which is as language-independent as possible. It is used on French, English, Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Polish, Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, Cantonese and Japanese in SPPAS software, a tool distributed under the terms of the GPL license.