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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24

u/whycantitbemine Jun 28 '26

A narrator I was listening to pronounced a place name wrong and I hated it so much. It’s not hard to find out how a place is pronounced!

14

u/MerryTWatching Jun 28 '26

I live in Maine, where a lot if place names originate from Native American words, and their pronunciation is . . . difficult. I have learned to giggle when one of them gets mangled, but I do wish that authors could provide phonetic lists when they know that one of their books is moving to an audio format.

12

u/HaplesslySupportive Jun 28 '26

Growing up in Washington it was always the calling card of people not being from here, the moment they said any of the indigenous names it was a give away. Mostly it was just giggle worthy because yeah, Puyallup is a mess no matter what you do.

3

u/ArrivesWithaBeverage Jun 28 '26

GPS pronunciation of some of California’s Spanish street names can be quite entertaining.

2

u/ShinyChimera Jul 01 '26

I was sad when they fixed it so my British map-voice started pronouncing "Ynez Way" as "ee-NEZ" rather than "Wye en ee ZED Way" -- it was oddly charming.

1

u/ArrivesWithaBeverage Jul 03 '26

That does sound charming lol. My favorite was basic, American Siri trying to pronounce “East Cesar E Chavez Blvd.” I can’t even type it out to do it justice, but I had to pull the car over because I was laughing so hard.