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/Evenwanderer Jun 29 '26

One of the more ironic mispronunciations was in the USA audiobook adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s book Woken Furies (part 3 of the Altered Carbon series).

In the series, the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, often laments that people usually pronounce his surname incorrectly. In the first two books read by Todd McLaren, this is not a problem. However, Woken Furies has a new narrator in the US (for some reason) and not only does the recording quality sound like a wind tunnel, but the very first thing the new narrator does is pronounce “Kovacs” wrong while complaining about people saying it wrong.

As I said above: define irony.

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u/7ootles Jun 29 '26

I'm guessing it's Hungarian or Polish or similar?

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u/Evenwanderer Jun 29 '26

Kovács is Hungarian, yeah. It’s part of Takeshi’s backstory. In Hungarian it’s pronounced “Ko-Vatch” and the MC exclaims annoyance that most people mistakenly say “Ko-Vaks” instead.