Listening to an audiobook recently and the narrator pronounced the word “heretic” like “he-REH-tick” (opposed to the more common “HEHR-e-tick”). Not really a big deal; the pronunciation even makes sense given that of the word “heretical” (which hasn’t appeared in the book yet, I don’t think). But, it was so distracting because you have four or more different characters all repeating the word over throughout the passage. There’s even one character who says it thrice in a row: “HeREtics, heREtics, heREtics!”
Have you come across any situations with pronunciations that bugged you?
Side note, do publishers ever have someone actually listen to an entire recorded work of a voiceover actor? I had a friend who did VO work and he told me his recordings weren’t ever listened to in their in their entirety, but he was doing small time textbooks not novels, IIRC.
by SkyBS
31 Comments
grimACED.
Not an audiobook, but an AI voice on YouTube. In a video about Danny Masterson, they said he “R asterisk ped” her. You know, cuz they can’t say rape. They have to say “r*ped.”
the last name Nguyen. The narrator pronounced it “En-GUY-en”
Brienne of Tarth being Bry-een in Roy Dotrice’s ASOIAF narration lol.
Also in Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, the VO was done by a lady with a Japanese surname. Which, cool, but then why can’t she pronounce any of the words or names properly? The male name Daisuke became “Daisuki” meaning romantic love. I do wonder why they would ignore a real name turning into an entire different word.
Mackinac pronounced like it looks. It’s supposed to be Mack-in-aw.
Yes, I know how it looks like it should be pronounced. And yes, I understand that a narrator might not realize it has a particular pronunciation.
But I’m from Michigan and mack-in-ack sounds so profoundly wrong.
A narrator pronounced the word “Stuyvesant” (a high school in NYC, named after the Dutch director-general of New Netherlands in the 1600s) as though it was French. So instead of STY-vuh-sent, it was stee-vuh-SAUNT, which sounded very silly. Couldn’t she have, like, asked someone?
There were a number of them in the audiobooks for the Book of the Ancestor trilogy. Basic words were being mispronounced, “tomb” being one of the main offenders iirc. Honestly the whole performance by the narrator was a mess. It was remarkably bad.
I have heard ‘toque’ (tooook) pronounced as ‘too-kay’ and toke. Very disconcerting to us Canadians. LOL.
The narrator of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich consistently says *Volkischer BEO-bachter* instead of *Volkischer Be-O-bachter* when he talks about one of the Nazi newspapers.
I’ve heard “feng shui” pronounced badly many, many times. That’s an annoying one.
Integral vs Integral, one is a math function the other is all else…In-tay-gurl vs In-teg-ral…
Well the alternative pronunciation does make sense historically as although heretic is mostly used as a noun these days it was at one time used as an adjective in the same way we use heretical today.
For myself I love Sherlock Holmes & so when I saw an 82 hour unabridged audio collection for only a single credit on Audible I immediately added it to my collection. My downfall came when the American narrator managed to butcher the pronunciation of a number of common 19th century colloquialisms in ways that so ground my gears it took me a day or so to listen past each one. So glad I returned it when the Stephen Fry narrated version came out.
Listening to NOS4A2 by Joe Hill and I love Kate Mulgrew but someone should have told her how to say the town of Haverhill, MA. She says it a lot and it takes me out of the story and makes me yell at the radio with the proper pronunciation. Joe Hill should have known better.
I hate how text to speech will pronounce words without an ‘s’ correctly, but get completely confused when you add the ‘s’. “The MAY-ge and his fellow mah-ges”.
Just came to say that I’ve never heard anyone say heretic as hehr-e-tick. The only way I know is he-reh-tick.
I say he REH tic. I’m not sure i have ever heard it pronounced, but i feel like i must have. Maybe i only ever heard the guy who is reading your audiobook say it.
In The Midnight Library, Carey Mulligan pronounces LaJolla California not LAH HOI AH but LA JOLL AH. She had a great American accent though.
Even accomplished voice actors are about half and half on “timbre”. It’s TAM-bur, not a homonym for timber.
A few times in the expanse Jefferson Mayes says gimbals with a J instead of a hard G.
That and American narrators pronouncing niche as if it rhymed with witch.
A narrator was describing oil and instead of viscous he said vicious. Not only a sentient oil, but a mean one too.
I’m currently listening to books by Jane Harper (highly recommend!) and it could just be the difference between how American English is pronounced vs. Australian, but the word “Skeletal” is said “skel -E-tal” (I think) instead of how I hear it in my mind: “skel-eh-tal”. Takes me aback!
Also recently revisited (in audio) books I loved as a child & was bemused when several names of people & places were pronounced WAY differently than I had been hearing them in my head all my life: the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander was a big one. My internal pronounciation of pretty much all the names in those books was completely different from how the sound in the audio.
Tried listening to Prador Moon by Neal Asher not too long ago. I don’t remember the narrator, but he pronounced Occam’s Razor as O-cam. Extremely common name.
Mosquito as Moss Keto. I mean, it was a British narrators and they do pronounce it a little different across the line, but it’s not two words.
I listened to Children of Ruin and I don’t think this counts as a mispronunciation cause the narrator is British and I think it’s the standard pronunciation there. But it threw me off every time she said “cephalopod” with a hard K sound!
Sometimes I hear a character’s name a certain way in my head and then get confused when I hear how the author/narrator pronounces it. Like Discworld’s Sgt. Angua. I always “heard” it as AHN-gwa but the audiobook version has it as AANG-you-a
Luckily, she was a minor character, but I listened to an audiobook where the narrator pronounced Perdita as “PURR-dit-ta” instead of “Pur-DEE-tah”.
Also, apparently Maurice is pronounced Morris in Britain. Which made it very jarring to hear, when I had read the book several times and always pronounced it More-REES in my head.
I don’t know if it’s that bad but the one that always got my nerves was the narrator for game of thrones would switch between “Jeffery” and “Joffery”
A posh character pronouncing the name of the posh bank “Coutts” as cowts rather than coots, immediately threw me from the story and reminded me it’s an actor doing a posh voice.
Jefferson Mays does an absolutely outstanding job narrating The Expanse books, but he once pronounced cumin as “coming” and it took me all the way out of the story.
In one of the Expeditionary Forces books the narrator says “DFAC” (Abbreviation for dining facility on US military bases) as “D-F-A-C”, spelled out. I have only ever heard it said “dee-fac”.
sub-SEE-quint instead of Sub-suh-quint for subsequint
I DNF’d the audiobook of American Psycho pretty quickly. My stomach couldn’t handle it lol. But the narrator pronounced the brand Hermès as “her mees” like if you are reading a book boasting about designer clothes you should know how to say them!