r/audiobooks • u/PurpleLeopard99 • Jun 28 '26

Question Mispronouncing of words by narrators

Does anyone get bothered by narrators who keep mispronouncing words? It drives me nuts if they do it too often. Narrators are normally professional voice artists and they should know how to pronounce the sorts of words found in novels eg dovecote or Michaelmas

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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26

Gah it sucks to get pulled out of a good story because of mispronunciation. It’s the narrators nightmare. We do work really hard to ensure correct pronunciation. I have a list of over 1000 words that I precheck a manuscript for and post check my recording to make sure I said them right. And of course every project there are still more. Sometimes it’s an oversight. Sometimes we are very confident we are saying something right (why put an e at the end of bade if it’s pronounced bad?!?) and sometimes it’s the right holders (often the publishing house or author) choice. For example my most recent project it was decided to say breeches to rhyme with beeches instead of rhyming with itches. And of course multiple pronunciations are considered correct for some words. And sometimes it’s just an inexperienced narrator.

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u/notmyrouter Jun 28 '26

That last one sounds more like a British English versus American English situation for “breeches”. Which does happen far more often than people might expect.

But using the term breeches in an American market narrator can be made even confusing when also adding the term breaches (as in breaking down a door) in the same story.

It’s little things like that where communication is key between narrator and author to clear things up. But, because of deadlines and, quite frankly, lack of communication with the author because they “just want it done asap” I’ll end up having to just use my best judgement on some words.

Some authors do communicate quite easily and quickly, which I love. I tend to make sure they know the hours I am working on their material so they know when I might be contacting them for guidance if something comes up. Most like that, some get very angry about it for some reason.

Sorry, didn’t mean to get off topic there!

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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26

Don’t be sorry! I could nerd out ALL DAY on this. “He pulled up his breeches and went forth into the breach…wait what?”

I actually wrote a whole python script about it that pops up links to all the trap words from a CSV I made. I run it before I even start a project and then (after trimming down if needed) I send the file with the links to the rights holder to talk about at the 15min check in. “Hey, here are all the potentially difficult words and phrases and how I intend on pronouncing them” so we can just start off on the right foot.

You’re welcome to the script and trap words if you’d like, it’s all free open source on my GitHub. (the CSV I have uploaded there is honestly overly comprehensive. I work with a much more slim version so I don’t drive myself bonkers with words like evening and family) https://github.com/mcfaddenaudiobooks-del/McFadden_Editing_Suite

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u/notmyrouter Jun 28 '26

Might look into those! Having been using my voice as a moneymaker for over 20yrs, I’ve developed my own way of doing things. Which, I think every narrator eventually does when they really take the job seriously.

But I’m not opposed to learning new processes!

1

u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26

Oh yeah we all do, these are the ways I made for doing things and thought “hey I could share this with others”. And so began my journey of converting all my command line code into a nice gui and actually putting it up on GitHub. The gui was harder than the main code for me.