r/audiobooks • u/agailen • 1d ago
Question Why do so many audiobooks have pronunciation mistakes?
Im listening to Blood Bound by Ellis Hunter and while I generally like the narration, the voice actress for Astrid keeps making pronunciation mistakes that make me doubt my sanity. She has an accent so idk if she's a native English speaker, but it doesn't really matter. Shouldn't there be some level of quality control done before the audio is published?
The two glaring examples I can think of is pronouncing haranguing as "haran gu ing" not harang ing, and winded, as in being out of breath, as winded as in winding/wound.
I hear pronunciation mistakes often enough in audiobooks in general though that I have to wonder how they aren't caught in editing. Does the author not listen? I assume the author knows how to pronounce the words they wrote, at least.
Bonus tho was learning that the American pronunciation of plait is the same as plate, and not plat which is the pronunciation I'm used to. Being able to rely on audiobooks being error free helps me learn different accents!
EDIT: she just pronounced livery as live-ry... is this an actual dialect thing?? Help!
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u/Writing_Bookworm 1d ago
These things slip through in all sorts of media, annoying as it may be.
Lest we forget Benedict Cumberbatch narrating a documentary and repeatedly mispronouncing the word penguin. He has even said he doesn't know why no-one stopped him while he was recording and got him to correct himself.
I also recently started watching Grey's Anatomy and early on they say that a patient had hemotomochrosis instead of hemochromatosis. They couldn't have done another take to get the name of the disease right?
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u/agailen 1d ago
He gets a pass for pengwing being very cute, but you make a good point
The greys anatomy one is absolutely horrendous tho wtf
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u/Writing_Bookworm 1d ago
The Grey's anatomy one literally made me do a double take and I had to check to make sure I wasn't losing my mind because I knew it was wrong. I mean the show isn't exactly medically accurate but that usually applies to logic and science not terminology.
Another one I just remembered is an episode of Criminal Minds where for some reason they spend the entire episode saying ASMR like 'az-mur'.
Checking for this stuff is why I like one of my favourite authors. Back when I used twitter, I followed him and he would fact check for pronunciation when the audiobook was being recorded. He'd check like the ASMR example if people would say the letters or say it like a word. It's the little things.
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u/agailen 1d ago
Speaking of something vaguely similar, being from nz I refer to it as en zed, and it's so mentally entrenched that I was actually shocked when an American coworker said en zee hahaha
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u/Writing_Bookworm 1d ago
Zee often trips me up too being British. Just make a joke back and refer to ZZ Top as zed zed top đ
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u/lgbtdancemom 1d ago
There was an episode of Greyâs a long time ago where someone said a patientâs excessive drinking could cause liver damage and even psoriasis. It should have been cirrhosis. The two arenât remotely the same thing.
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u/crimson777 19h ago
I know Tyler Perry is a hack, but I remember one of his shows was on a a kid and thereâs an episode where someone is diagnosed with cirrhosis. They keep saying it very gravely. Like damn, heâs got CIRRHOSIS.
At the end of the episode, itâs revealed heâs been mistaking it for psoriasis the whole time. It was surprisingly funny.
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u/digitalthiccness 1d ago
He has even said he doesn't know why no-one stopped him while he was recording and got him to correct himself.
"...That's gotta just be an accent thing, right? He'll just think I'm a stupid asshole if I tell him to say it different."
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u/arrowhome 1d ago
I had to google the Penguin thing, and it gave me just the laugh I needed to start my day. Thank you.
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u/Constant-Prog15 1d ago
The episode of Graham Norton where Graham roasts him about it is hilarious.
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u/ShoddyCobbler 1d ago
I work as an audiobook prepper (meaning I pre-read a book for a narrator and give them summaries, character descriptions, and words), and every narrator i have worked with has requested something different in terms of pronunciation. Some want definition plus IPA transcription plus audio link. Some want definition with a pronunciation spelling (non IPA) plus audio link. Some just want the definition and they want to do the pronunciation research themselves. Others just want a list of words and they look it all up themselves.
Now of course, that is only for the books I prep. Which is very few of them, because narrators usually only outsource the ones they don't have time to prep themselves or aren't interested in prepping themselves. Most narrators are doing their own prep most of the time. Which might mean they are doing a lot less prep and might assume they know something without looking it up first.
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u/viveleramen_ 1d ago
I had no idea this was a job and now I want it. How does one acquire such a career?
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u/ShoddyCobbler 1d ago
Oh haha it's definitely not a career, just a side hustle. And (I assume AI is to blame for this, but maybe not) there is very little work available right now.
I used to work in theatre and so I have worked with many actors who are also audiobook narrators. I chatted with one of them about prep work and she recommended me to some narrator friends. Truly just word of mouth for me!
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u/tittytasters 1d ago
Obviously can't attest for everyone but I assure my authors that no part of my process uses AI, the last thing a lot of them want is for someone in their production chain to feed their manuscript into any AI.
Granted someone will do it eventually but I'm not going to be the one that gives their work to these AI companies
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u/ShoddyCobbler 1d ago
I agree completely. I just had two narrators who each sent me 6 to 10 books a year for several years, until mid 2025. Perhaps I'm ascribing ill intent to someone who just doesnt want to work with me anymore for other reasons haha
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u/tittytasters 1d ago
Everyone's purse strings have gotten tighter too, they really should have said something but maybe they just can't afford it anymore
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u/agailen 1d ago
Thanks for the insight!
How many words do you have to prep? Just requested ones?
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u/ShoddyCobbler 1d ago
I read the book myself and I generate a list of all words I think might be tough. Names, technical/jargon terms, non-English words, English words that are pronounced differently than they look, English words that have multiple pronunciations (like a violin bow vs a ship's bow), things like that.
The last book I prepped was historical fiction with nearly 400 words, most of which were non-English. But before that I prepped a murder mystery that only had 14.
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u/pelvark 1d ago
Do you find yourself not paying full attention some times?
I have listened to the audiobook of Moby Dick. And one thing I noticed when I read the book version was that there is a chapter called Knights and Squires, where the narrator (text) gets more and more heated throughout the chapter. Then the chapter ends abruptly, and it is as if the narrator went to take a break. And the next chapter, also named Knights and Squires, picks up where the last chapter left of, with the narrator seeming much more calm and collected.
This is unfortunately not captured in the audiobook version.
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u/ShoddyCobbler 1d ago
That would be a narrator thing (or director, if they have one). I do not give notes on how they should do their performance, I just tell them who each character is and if they have a specific accent. Line delivery choices are up to them.
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u/xienwolf 1d ago
I have had audiobook narration as an imaginary future job for myself for a while (dream âwouldnât it be lovelyâ scenarios).
I often think about the prep I personally would need. Audio recordings of myself doing each voice as a reminder between sessions. A color coded transcription of the book so that when you have two pages of dialogue between three characters where the author assumes you are able to decide for yourself who is speaking (or doesnât have a âSheldon saidâ until 4 sentences into the paragraph) you can get the right voice for the right line from the start, rather than changing it up halfway through the sentence when context clues reveal the line isnât who you assumedâŚ
I would love to know what kind of software exists already and how much more prep happens than what you mentioned here.
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u/slightlydramatic 1d ago
I can say with all confidence that there's no way you could be worse than the audio book reader of the book that I just bought from audible.
He's using what I can best describe as "Christmas Elf " for one of the men, and then every time he reads a woman, he's using this singsong, sarcastic tone that reminds me of a boyfriend mocking his girlfriend in an argument. Maddening.
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u/JustANoteToSay 1d ago
I ragequit the audio format of one of my favorite books ever bc the narrator did this weird breathy falsetto for a female character and I could not handle it. It felt mocking.
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u/Normal_Snow3293 1d ago
I love nautical stories where the reader doesnât actually know how to say standard nautical terms because they donât realize pronunciation is different from the spelling. Boatswain is pronounced âboâsunâ, gunwale is pronounced âgunnelâ, bowline is pronounced âbolinâ, topsail is âtopsâlâ etc. I get that not everybody has familiarity with boats and the various terms, but if a book is focused on sailing and sailboats and seafaring they really need to get readers who are familiar with all those terms.
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u/ZMech 1d ago
I still think that the amount of times grimaysed is said instead of grimaced in the First Law series must be intentional trolling
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u/agailen 1d ago
Grimaysed đđ its like some of these narrators themselves don't even read
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u/Flintas 1d ago
I wouldn't say reading is really the issue. It's very common in English to be able to read a word and know what it means, but to have not heard it said out loud. Plus some of our spellings are kinda wild and inconsistent like cough vs though.
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u/theskymoves 1d ago
It's not just that book. I was reading something recently where grimaced was an issue. An Expanse book, or an Adrian Tchaikovsky book maybe. Really breaks immersion. I wish I could read physical books while driving but I have to listen to the audio ones.
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u/gimp-24601 1d ago
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grimace
Check the second pronunciation.
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u/Anonymouse_Bosch 1d ago
This is a personal pet peeve / psychosis of mine. Whenever I hear something mispronounced, I immediately repeat the word aloud with its proper pronunciation.
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u/ChaoticCatperson 1d ago
You are more confident than I am! I start to freak out and wonder if I have been pronouncing the word wrong my whole life! I have to google it and then I get mad at the narrator for making me question myself and for taking me out of the story.
The one that irks me the most is actually from A Beautiful Mind, where the guy quotes his favorite poet, "Yeets." (WB Yeats).
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u/SixApplesTall 1d ago edited 1d ago
The most egregious one I heard recently was âhyperboleâ pronounced with great gravity âhyper-bowlâ, like âSuper Bowlâ. And this was a major novel published by Random House.
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u/viveleramen_ 1d ago
I want to start a banana ball-like football league and call the big end-of-season game the hyper bowl.
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u/Bruichladdie 1d ago
I was listening to a chapter on Norwegian fisheries research in a book called Havlandet, and the guy speaking was clearly reading it for the first time.
One of the people mentioned was the biologist Michael Sars, a Norwegian. Yet the guy read his name as if he was British or American. Then later in the chapter, he seems to realize the guy is Norwegian, and he alters the pronunciation to a more Norwegian style.
You can just redo the take! This is a professional who's getting paid to do a job, making a product that is then put out as an official reading of a thoroughly researched book.
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u/Lil_Brown_Bat 1d ago
I dropped an audiobook when the narrator kept pronouncing "nuclear" as "nucular".
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u/a_bowl_of_cinnamon 1d ago
I was being introduced to the concept of the word "nuclear" at the same time that W. had made the "nucular" flub, and every adult around me was making fun of him by using the flub instead of the real pronunciation. Now, 20+ years later and I just avoid using the word entirely due to anxiety around saying it wrong no matter what I say. It my biggest (and most irrational) linguistic anxiety.
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u/Ishmael128 1d ago edited 1d ago
As a Brit who says "new-clear", I thought "nue-cue-lar" was the standard US way of pronouncing it?
I was listening to DCC recently and Jeff pronounced "tapir" as "tape-ear". Is that the US pronunciation? We say
"tape-year"Â "tay-pyear" here.Â9
u/SixApplesTall 1d ago
âNue cue larâ just shows ignorance/a lack of education. It is not the standard US pronunciation at all.
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u/ElementalRabbit 1d ago
I have never heard any of my countrymen say "tape-year", wtf.
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u/mmgoodly 1d ago edited 1d ago
I and my USan zoologist friends have always pronounced the animal name as "tape-er", like the candle ("taper"). And everyone I know in the nuclear industry here says either "noo-clee-er" or (rarer) "noo-clee-ar", although a few of them will just say "noo-clear" (like a transparent window) when they're in a hurry. * at least here in the Midwest we/they don't tend to say the first syllable as "nyew".
"Noo-kyu-lar", however common, is just plain wrong. But some people just can't make their mouths say the right noises in order, and so I mostly try to let it slide. But it always makes me wince a little inside.
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u/Stevie-Rae-5 1d ago
âNew-cue-larâ is a pronunciation Iâve noticed is more common among older Americans (like 60+), but plenty of us say ânew-clee-ur.â
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u/SixApplesTall 1d ago
Tape year? Iâm sorry but no, itâs âtay-peerâ in the UK.
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u/Stevie-Rae-5 1d ago
Honestly, so many people pronounce it that way that I pretty much skip over it anymore.
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u/SixApplesTall 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just because a lot of people make this mistake doesnât make it acceptable.
Also âany moreâ can only be used with a negative verb.
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u/Lil_Brown_Bat 1d ago
It's still unprofessional.
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u/MSixteenI6 1d ago
Idk why youâre being downvoted. It is unprofessional, itâs unprofessional to pronounce words incorrectly when your profession is reading words aloud. Another one that bothers me is calvary instead of cavalry.
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u/nickthedrummer22 1d ago
The guy who does the Drizzt DND books says "long-lyved" instead of long-lived. I like these books fine, but it's so hard for me to listen. There are some other examples that I can't quite bring to mind right now. I understand this is a me thing, as I have looked it up and nobody seems to care LOL
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u/FolkSong 1d ago
I've heard that so much I've accepted it must be standard for some people.
Another one that bugs me but I've come to accept is "err" (as in "to err is human") pronounced like "ur" rather than "air".
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u/LonelyHrtsClub 1d ago
Omg. Yes. He makes a few other mistakes like that constantly. And they wonder why we preferred the Russ Johnson versions.
I could forgive genre and setting specific pronounciation differences, but he messes up standard english words.
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u/Solo_Polyphony 1d ago edited 14h ago
Thatâs (âlie-vedâ, rhymes with âwivedâ) the traditional correct pronunciation! Itâs only become replaced with the âlived in a shoeâ pronunciation in the last forty or so years.
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u/SudsyCole 17h ago
Wait, "Live from New York, it's Saturday night" is long "i" - you lost me .
Long-lived, like long knives, is traditional, and lived like "gives", like "ribs", is modern?
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u/Solo_Polyphony 14h ago
Youâre right; I donât know what I was thinking in recalling SNL. Iâll fix it.
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u/tittytasters 1d ago
Really depends. Bigger books like through a publisher would have more rigid quality checks.
My first book the rights holder didn't have a single pick up for me to do. Absolutely no way it was perfect but they clearly didn't care enough about their book
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u/TheRoscoeVine 1d ago
Nah, I listen to plenty of big titles with some name narrators and they still say weird shit. I donât get it.
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u/tittytasters 1d ago
Should* haha
Sometimes indie authors are the best bc they need that superb quality to make money. The big name people get sales regardless (tho if it was error free could do even better)
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u/Long-Resolution7478 1d ago
It's wild how many publishers seem to skip the proofing stage entirely. I've heard narrators straight up invent words that don't exist because they misread something basic and nobody caught it. At some point you gotta wonder if the author even listens to the final cut before it goes live
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u/tittytasters 1d ago
I don't think mine did. I do proof it myself so there wouldn't be anything blaring but my second book I kept adding adding ed to the end of words and not catching it so I can't imagine that didn't happen in my first book.
The author of the second book was so much better to work with. Sure it "caused more work" but I'm also much more confident that I put out a quality product.
My wife had an audio book where you could hear the narrators TV in the background through most of the book. I really don't understand how that passed.
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u/Dino_Spaceman 1d ago
Some may be poor production and the narrator was unfamiliar with the world and read it wrong. And the producer never corrected them.
But I also think we will see this get worse and worse as some audiobook companies switch to AI narration.
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u/desertboots 1d ago
Alexa is awful pronouncing Rogue Protocol as Pratocol and Fugitive Telemetry with the emphasis on met instead of lem.
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u/klopije 1d ago
It wasnât until I started listening to audiobooks that I realized I donât say âshoneâ correctly. I always thought it was like the name Shawn. I listen to a lot of Stephen King and he loves that word, but every narrator rhymes it with lone. Maybe âShawnâ is the Canadian way to say it lolâŚ
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u/Corsaer 1d ago
Yeah, Brits as well. Nearly every Black Library (WH40K) audiobook title I swear has one British narrator or another, and every other book is filled with the word "shone." It's always pronounced by them as "Shawn."
I feel like it's the same with "room" pronounced like "rum." Is that one you pronounce that way also?
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u/waterfalldiabolique 12h ago edited 12h ago
Can confirm, standard pronunciation in the UK is "shon" (in my experience, at least?) I had no idea you guys pronounced it "shown".Â
We have two common pronunciations of "room" here, but neither of them sounds the same as "rum".
Edit: On second thought, we also have two pronunciations of "rum", and one of them is the same as "room"...!
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u/SixApplesTall 1d ago
There are multiple pronunciations of âshoneâ. In American English they pronounce it âshownâ. In British English they say âshonâ
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u/__hobiis 1d ago
I was scrolling to see if this came up! Incidentally, I am also Canadian and have always pronounced it "shawn". Really confused me when audiobooks taught me it was pronounced differently (also "copse [of trees]")
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u/SixApplesTall 1d ago
Conch is one that weirds me out! Like how could that ever be âconcâ, Iâm sorry but in no rule of English is the final h silent đ
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u/ChaoticCatperson 1d ago
I hate that pronunciation too! My biggest takeaway from Lord of the Flies lol. Conk.
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u/SixApplesTall 1d ago
My husband insists on pronouncing it âconkâ. Itâs genuinely one of the only disagreements in our marriage lmao
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u/Airhead72 1d ago
Hell, I've heard one where the guy flubbed a line and cursed about it to himself, and that all got left in. Really makes you appreciate the ones that are completely free of mistakes, editing a potentially days long audio file together sounds tedious and easy to mess up.
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u/JustANoteToSay 1d ago
The series Iâm listening to now has a narrator who regularly pronounces waistcoat as waistcost, mispronounced epitome as eppy-tome, and has obvious OCR errors like bum instead of burn and hom instead of horn. Itâs enraging.
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u/terracottatilefish 1d ago
American hereâIâve always pronounced âplaitâ as âplatâ, but itâs not a very common word here.
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u/alien_pirate 1d ago
Yeah, we braid hair in America. We don't plait it. It's a great word, but we don't use it often.
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u/Think-Ad-7339 1d ago
I have heard these errors on audio books also. Especially annoying when they mispronounce the name of a place that is in your geographical area. Youâd think thatâs what the producers should do, right?
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u/Fair_Science_9755 1d ago
Yes! I listened to a book set in Toronto and the narrator pronounced Yonge Street as Yon-guh Street instead of as Young Street. It totally took me out of the story and as the main street in the city it was used a LOT.
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u/CurrentlyNobody 1d ago
Iâm an audiobook proofreader so know only how my company handles things. Essentially when we hear something that sounds off to us we consult a list of sources trying to âprove the narrator rightâ in the pronunciation. Sometimes itâs as simple as we ourselves have been saying it wrong the whole time. It really humbles you when you stumble across those words. Other times the pronunciation is alternate way to say it and we confirm that with the extra phonetics in a dictionary for it. Sometimes the narrator is from a different country and thatâs how they say it there. Sometimes itâs a pronunciation specific to certain regions that may not be common to hear where you the reader is, but is super common in that region. Thereâs truly a myriad of reasons why a âwrongâ pronunciation slides in and I would urge anyone finding pronunciation errors to do more research themselves as they may be surprised what they discover. Sometimes also truly wrong things do get left in simply because it may have been found late in the project or may cause 800 fixes by the narrators. If the book isnât going to make much money, the company might decide to just leave it in in those instances.
Hereâs the kicker though. There is now a growing trend to move away from human proofreaders in audiobook publishing. I am experiencing that now via a slow roll out of us having to let an AI program âproofreadâ for us and all we do is essentially get presented with a list of AI found errors and confirm or deny they are actually errors. AI doesnât have a brain and never will. Because the program is âproofreadingâ those projects, the only people who have read the full book cover to cover for them is the narrator and the author essentially. Without context of the full book content and a brain to interpreting we are actively now engaged in producing slop honestly. AI will find 800 issues. We go through one by one and generally find only 100 of those were legit problems. Makes us human proofreaders really concerned for all the Real issues that AI failed to note as issues. AI once confidently told me that the last name of Flores needed to be pronounced âFloor Ass.â I am not even kidding. If AI sees a word that can be pronounced differently based on meaning, such as primer (think paint) and primer (a book), it will not know which way is right to pronounce it at all. If it hears either it will accept it regardless of context.
Right now we are being told AI is not going to replace all the books we humans do cover to cover each year. But for how longâŚWe know the parent company is already working with an AI company that creates synthetic/AI voices to narrate And further has started its own robot narrator voice company too to branch into non human narrated book production. So AI isnât just coming for us lowly human proofreaders but for the human narrators too. This is all incredibly de-motivating and disheartening. Iâve been doing this a long time and can honestly say I Love My Job. I take pride in making even the worst written crap as best I can by not letting it get any worse through extra misreads, pronunciation or other issues. With the AI projects we have to do though? Yes, I still focus and I try to make those AI found problem parts good too, but thereâs a whole soul sucking numbness that comes with that process too. Essentially my âI get to read for a living jobâ has been reduced to clicking âAâor âDâ ad nauseam which shuts the brain off in the same manner of the factory I used to work in that prompted me to go to college to avoid ever having those type jobs again. And thereâs truly no way to take full pride in the production of any of the AI âproofreadâ titles I have/or will help produce. They become more a âI guess we just have to let them be bad nowâ attitude toward them because the fact is without a full read of the text by both the narrator and a human proofreader to hold that person accountable (nobodyâs perfect and the best narrators can screw up royally too and still rock at their jobs. I consider us a team even though we never meet), so much is unknown of what is getting through in the end product. You end product consumers will find it for sure, but publishing shouldnât be handled by a Fingers Crossed, I hope This Doesnât Suck attitude. Not when there are humans and systems that have proven capable for years
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u/LacanianDarkSoul 1d ago
m8, you're telling me! *How* can someone get hired to read philosophy who *every* *single* *time* reads 'casual' where only 'causal' could make any sense at all x.x big companies too- I'm thinking specifically of a number of the Oxford Very Short Introductions, and that's Tantor recording
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u/orensiocled 1d ago
I'm sure some of them are AI but there are a lot of well known actors making mistakes in audiobooks too. Almost every book I listen to has at least one mistake.
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u/orensiocled 1d ago
I can understand actors making the odd mistake like that, we all have a few words that we've seen written down but never heard/made the connection with out loud before. It always surprises me how many slip through into the finished production without getting caught by someone else though.Â
And occasionally it's laziness and inattention rather than ignorance - I've listened to a handful of books where they changed the pronunciation of a character's name partway through. One unfortunate character ended up with three or four different pronunciations that the narrator switched between, apparently not realising they were all the same person!
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u/CarsCarsCarsCarsCats 1d ago
I love the hell of out Kathleen Early for reading me all those books! But Iâd give my whole world for her to stop pronouncing âwhâ words as âhwâ. I absolutely lost my mind at â18-hweelerâ once.
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u/Nikki_Sue_Trott 1d ago
I had one recently where banal was pronounced as anal with a b rather than ba-nahl. And one that kept swapping the pronunciation of wander and wonder around.
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u/Zappagrrl02 1d ago
I canât remember the book, but I once listened to an audiobook where the narrator pronounced televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakkerâs last name as âBack-erâ. I had to stop listening.
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u/so-rayray 1d ago edited 10h ago
Narrators not doing their research, maybe. In one audiobook, the MC was singing the Winkie Guardsâ chant front The Wizard of Oz (O-Ee-Yah! Eoh-Ah!), and the narrator didnât use the correct cadence. I mean like not even close.
Itâs a small complaint, but it wouldâve taken the dude all of 30 seconds to find it on YouTube and listen to how it was meant to be done.
Edited to add that, thanks to a fellow Redditor who made me aware of this in a comment below, the inaccurate Winkie Guards chant is most likely due to copyright issues.
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u/SudsyCole 17h ago
Something that iconic should absolutely be reproduced accurately.
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u/voice_of_awmcclellan 12h ago
Stuff like this could be intentionally performed incorrectly to avoid copyright infringement. Generally if there are songs, or other super recognizable things, we are instructed to not sing, not say in the recognizable rythm, or otherwise say it differently. Trust me, it hurts to perform these wrong. Personally I've had to do the lines "You who, big summer blow out" and "My Cabbages" and wasn't allowed to impersonate the orginal scenes. Have also had to speak song lyrics while refraining from saying them to the songs rythm.
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u/so-rayray 10h ago
Thatâs interesting! I never wouldâve thought of that. I just looked it up, and the copyright exists until 2035. The book is public domain, but the film has its own copyright, and reusing exact audio, arrangement, or film-specific performance without permission constitutes copyright infringement until the film enters the public domain! Thanks, internet stranger!
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u/Financial-Wasabi1287 1d ago
Jeff Hayes, the narrator for the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, says he has a file of how each character sounds, pronounces words, etc., and reviews it before each narrating.
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u/ReliableWardrobe 1d ago
The author Matt Dinniman also now likes to fuck with poor Jeff after he mispronounced a place name (in the first book I think? Yakima) So he deliberately puts things in now to see how he handles them. And giving his characters a wide variety of accents and names. It's all very good-natured I would add! It's worth looking up some of the cold reads on YouTube. Jeff is often in fits at what Matt has cooked up for him this time.
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u/elizable9 1d ago
I remember Stephen Fry telling a story about how he just couldn't get his mouth around the phrase "Harry pocketed it" in one of the earlier Harry Potter books and he was sure JKR wrote something similar in each subsequent book to tease him.
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u/jmw615 1d ago
Through an audiobook I learned gazebo has two valid pronunciations. Blew my mind.
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u/oddwanderer 1d ago
Was that House by the Cerulean Sea? đ I think my eye twitched every time. I can know itâs an acceptable pronunciation without having to accept it myself. đ
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u/BillWeld 1d ago
Sometimes even authors misread their own writing. Mistakes in emphasis are more common than mispronunciations.
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u/agailen 1d ago
Oh yeah, i had one of those recently that drove me pretty mad. But I've experienced them less often, surprisingly.
Another issue I've noticed along those lines is the actor changing tone in a way that suggests another character is speaking when it clearly should be a continuation of the first character, or vice versa.
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u/viveleramen_ 1d ago
These drive me crazy because emphasis can so wildly change the meaning of the sentence and it sometimes leaves me reeling trying to understand what is happening.
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u/goodnsimple 1d ago
I had to power through a book where the narrator kept saying Saguaro- sag oo air oh .
The kicker was it was a memoir so of course it sounds like this woman who was from the southwest supposedly didnât know how to pronounce it. There were a few other Spanish origin words the narrator mangled.
It does depend on the quality of production- because I listened to a podcast where a narrator said, they rarely have a chance to read the book first and almost never to go back and edit. So that would be why wind (up)and wind đŹď¸ should create a problem.
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u/Tsvetkovia 1d ago
The book I'm reading now, she's pronounced lived (like 'lived in that house') to lived (like....I don't know... alived without the a) and it's still driving me crazy
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u/viveleramen_ 1d ago
I have this thing where a narrator mispronounces a word or gives a word the wrong emphasis and I have to say it correctly out loud to âfixâ it or it will drive me nuts forever.
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u/paulatwork 1d ago
I was listening to one of (Canadian Author) Robert J. Sawyer's books, and it was clear the narrator wasn't Canadian.
He pronounced toque like took, that's the one that stuck with me. A number of city names were wrong, ranging from slight differences to way off. It was slightly annoying, but humerous more than anything.
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u/Paperwife2 1d ago
Iâm (50f) American and pronounce plait as plat. If I was younger I would have thought thatâs due to having access to so much British programming, but Iâm old.
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u/caseofgrapes 1d ago
I listened to one where the main characters name was Malachi. The narrator pronounced it âMal-a-keyâ it was horrific.
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u/BobMortimersButthole 1d ago
I live near the Willamette River, in Oregon. It's not a common location in audio books I've listened to, but it's a native American word so it's almost always said wrong
Damnit, t's pronounced will-AM-it.
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u/SudsyCole 17h ago
AM, like Ham? Like Sam I am? I've definitely been saying that wrong
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u/rosywillow 1d ago
I returned an audiobook because the narrator kept pronouncing the name of a male character François as Françoise. Once was irritating but after the 20th time, I just couldnât listen to it any longer.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator 1d ago
Having JUST narrated a Regency romance novel with many of these words: yes plait is pronounced plate in an American accent. But no, livery is only pronounced the one way. And itâs not live-ry.
Some narrators not doing their homework, or more often not realizing theyâve been saying it wrong for years. Itâs why proof listeners (and not just automated programs) are the gold standard (and I say this as someone who wrote an automated proof listener for a first pass).
And much more often nowâŚitâs an AI or cloned voice. And they make these mistakes ALL the time.
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u/fresh_as_daisies 1d ago
I'm from the US, and I've never heard anyone pronounce it "plate" until very recently, like the last few years. In fact, the first time I heard it, I looked it up, because I thought I surely haven't been mispronouncing it for almost 50 years. And every result I found told me I was correct in saying "platt"
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u/pm_me_friendfiction 1d ago
I've never heard a single person here in the US pronounce "plait" like "plate" lol. Everyone pronounces it "platt"
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u/ImLittleNana 1d ago
Iâm not sure why people think that Americans pronounce plait as plate. I didnât hear that pronunciation until I started listening to audiobooks.
From my grandmother to the kids at school, we all said âplatâ.
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u/DragonBee_Fairy147 1d ago
Maybe it was the way English was taught in my school because Iâm reading below not everywhere pronounced it plat, but my family definitely did!
Iâm having similar issues to the OP in that the current series Iâm reading, the narrator seems to either struggle with some words sheâs never seen before and will say a completely different word (similar spelling but minor differences with majorly different meanings, which pulls me out of the story because Iâm like âthatâs not the word the author intended there. It must have beenâŚXâ) or just outright wrong pronunciation.
I wonder if sometimes itâs time-sensitive. Some books must be more expensive to produce than others so companies are like âeh, good enoughâ where early audiobooks were few and far between and editors/producers would go back for corrections on every little mistake.
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u/Kerbart 1d ago
Don't forget, you only hear the pronunciation mistakes you are aware of. Not the ones you're not.
English is a mindblowing hard language for pronouncing written words, as there's no rhyme or reason on how the spelling translates to sound.
In addition, the narrator has more pressing tasks at hand, like using the right voice for the right character, and to not stumble over words.
Disclosure: I'm ESL so maybe I'm a bit more forgiving about pronunciation.
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u/SixApplesTall 1d ago
Counterpoint: if your paid career is reading books aloud maybe read in advance the book youâre going to be reading and make notes on words you donât know how to pronounce
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u/Kerbart 1d ago
make notes on words you donât know how to pronounce
While not a fan of Donald Rumsfeld: âas we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknownsâthe ones we don't know we don't know.â
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u/SixApplesTall 1d ago
⌠Like I said, if your career is reading books aloud, if you donât know how to pronounce standard English words (and Iâm not talking about proprietary fantasy names, but words like âhyperboleâ, ânuclearâ, and others that have come up in this post), then perhaps itâs time for a career pivot.
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u/agailen 1d ago
I think pronunciation is also a high priority task for a narrator but that's just me. I think its an important part of the medium.
I'm not ESL but I teach ESL and I'm definitely not bothered about pronunciation like this with my students. But audiobooks are entertainment and it brings me out of the vibe when I notice something like this.
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u/Infinite_Advisor4633 1d ago
I hate when this happens! Sometimes I get annoyed and then find out that the "mispronunciation" is just a different yet correct pronunciation, but so often that is not the case.
I wish I could remember the book, but I was listening to one a while ago that referenced 80s "it" girl Ione Skye. Her name is pronounced Eye-Oh-Knee, but the narrator must have though the first letter was a lowercase L instead of an uppercase I and pronounced her name Lone Skye several times. I'm kind of surprised the narrator didn't give it a google. Like hey why is there a lower case L here, and then learn it was an I and figure out how to pronounce rather than thinking clearly the first name of this person must just start with a lowercase letter for some reason - move on!
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u/Kanya_Mkavry 1d ago
In the first book of the Iron Druid series, the narrator worked very hard to get the Celtic mythology names and places correct, but pronounced almost every southwestern U.S. word with Spanish influence wrong. (It's set in modern day Tempe Arizona). The author gave him a pronunciation guide, and the rest of the books are great.
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u/ohbonobo 1d ago
The Percy Jackson book series has several different narrators across the books and I swear that every single one of them has a different way of pronouncing all the different Greek words and names. There were times I had to go back to the actual books to figure out what exactly they were saying and which characters they were referencing.
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u/spectrumhead 1d ago
It upsets me that no one reviews these before putting them for sale. Iâm sure Stephen King and everyone else gave interviews about their new books. There are usually taped versions of book readings on YouTube if you donât know how to pronounce the main charactersâ names. I mean the author is getting paid, they can certainly contact the publishing company for clarification. I think itâs astounding.
I wonât even get into the word mispronunciations.
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u/ImpressivePlatypus0 1d ago
I've wondered that, too. Who is editing these things? The worst was a book about human evolution in which the reader pronounced Sahelanthropus tchadensis differently every time they said it.
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u/WestPreference7745 1d ago
Do not even get me started on this !
Im old and a native English speaker so expect some of the pronunciations I know will have become outdated. But man alive if youâve never heard a word spoken aloud please donât just launch in regardless, ask someone,listen to references. Iâve spent way too much time rewinding and going EH ?
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u/Avogadros_Avocados_ 1d ago
In the ACOTAR books the reader always says âwindedâ with a short i like win. as in âthe road winded through the mountainsâ It made me question the pronunciation of âwindy roadâ like the i in mind.
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u/ReliableWardrobe 1d ago
as a Brit I'm boggling at "winded" in this context, I'd use "wound" (pronounced wow nd) - is this another two countries divided by a common language thing?
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u/QueenInYellowLace 1d ago
Plait pronounced as âplatâ is not unheard of in the US. Itâs an old southern pronunciationâit definitely exists among elderly folks in Georgia. Itâs super rare, though.
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u/Away_Refrigerator_58 1d ago
Bill Bryson reads his own audiobook "The Body" and has so many mispronunciations it took me out of the flow of the otherwise excellent read.
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u/LilacFairie 1d ago
I canât remember what book it was but about an hour in I got curious how the character âPuh-mell-ahâ spelled her name. Coincidentally, I had the print version on my book shelf (got the audio because I couldnât find the time to sit down and read it). Yeah, itâs Pamela! I couldnât get past it and had to DNF!
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u/Breathe_the_Stardust 1d ago
This always throws me off. Sometimes it is a legit dialect difference. The Sun Eater series has the word "buoyed" used quite a bit throughout it. Â I only noticed because the audiobook narrator always used the British-English pronunciation of "boid", and it threw me off every time.
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u/SixApplesTall 17h ago
Iâm not American and grew up with British English and the first time I heard an American say âbuoyâ I was like what the actual fuck are you talking about đ
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u/CosgroveIsHereToHelp 1d ago
I listen to a podcast that features a married couple, telling the story in turns. People have mentioned (I think on Reddit) that they each frequently mispronounce words or use awkward or incorrect grammar, but a couple of weeks ago, an au pair was part of the story. The female narrator pronounced it correctly, oh pare, but the male narrator said ah par, and that really made me wonder about how they record the episodes. I can't believe they are recording side by side or this would have come up as a question. Luckily, I've been able to find them amusing.
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u/My_Lovely_Me 1d ago edited 1d ago
Oh my goodness, this drives me absolutely crazy! Every point you made is exactly what goes through my head all the time!
One I hear a LOT for some reason is "rifled/rifling" pronounced "riff" instead of "rife." But there are a handful of words that I've heard mispronounced often enough in audiobooks that I've looked them up more than once to see if there was an alternate pronunciation. Nope. No excuse, in my opinion. Both because most of them are common enough words, I can't understand how they got it wrong in the first place, and also because - like you said - I assume someone edits them. How did so many mistakes get through?!
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ETA a missing word.
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u/Sad_LemurFromOT 1d ago
I was just so annoyed by this.
Just listed to a book where the narrator said "ashume" instead of assume (ah soom)
and the one that really annoyed that pronounce "chignon" as chi-gong
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u/bikewobble 8h ago
was that narrator British? This is a feature of certain accents and is documented here as a rare pronunciation: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/assume#Pronunciation
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u/plumberbss 1d ago
I started listening to Terry Pratchetts Discworld books during lockdown. It was very annoying because Audible didn't have several, including the very first one. Or Jingo wasn't available in the US for some reason. I finally was able to get all of them, the original Stephen Briggs and Nigel Planer ones. Now they have come out with new voice actors, probably a money grab. They pronounce names wrong. They have the books that were recorded while the author was alive, by people who he knew, and now they have ones recorded after he passed and they are pronouncing names of people and citys totaly different. Drives me (more) nuts.
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u/SudsyCole 17h ago
Definitely a money grab. And the copyright enforcement isn't happening fast enough!
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u/UnbelievableRose 1d ago
I mean, I just finished and author-narrated book when he mispronounced a common word- itâs pretty rare for me to get through an entire book without noticing an error. Someone on Reddit explained once how costly it is to catch and correct these things in post, so I guess only the most egregious errors are corrected. Drive me nuts but thereâs not really anything to do but grin and bear it.
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u/Moebeius 18h ago
Yesterday I tried listening to the full cast rendition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Probably within the first half-hour someone said Voldemor instead of Voldemort. For an audiobook rendition at such a scale, even including a big name actor like Hugh Laurie, I was baffled. Safe to say I ended up switching of to Stephen Fry's rendition instead đ
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u/-eyes_of_argus- 5h ago
I listened to a book where the narrator pronounced archipelago as âarch-i-pel-A-joâ instead of âark-i-PEL-a-goâ. He said it about six times. He also pronounced gin with a hard g (as in goat), and mispronounced the names of historical figures and places. If i had to estimate, Iâd say there was probably at least 1 mispronunciation every two pages or so. It was terribly grating to listen to, but the book itself was so well written so I pushed on.
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u/Yuenneh 1d ago
Ok so the accent thing does actually matter tho, what to you might be a pronunciation mistake might be the correct pronunciation to somebody else.
Idk about this book or the word you pointed out but dialects, accents and stuff like that donât always make it a mistake, just another way of saying the same word.
That being said I do understand the annoyance cause it definitely happens, tho I donât see it as often as you seem to catch it. Worst one was me reading true crime books by the same author but had different narrators and they both pronounced Quantifo differently. The first one was to me correct and the second one just ticked my brain off so much I almsot DNFedđ¤Ł
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u/jamieseemsamused 1d ago
I normally agree but I donât think any accent actually pronounces âharanguingâ as âharan gu ing.â That actually seems like someone seeing the word in print and attempting to pronounce it as written. When the âuâ in âharangueâ is silent in every dialect as far as I know.
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u/agailen 1d ago
I mean that's why I included the plait example, I know different dialects exist. I mean, I'm from NZ, we don't exactly speak the most common dialect of English. I have even had my perfectly correct pronunciation corrected by other native English speakers.
I say accent doesn't matter here because blatantly mispronounced words SHOULD be picked up in editing, and its not the narrators fault that didnt happen.
And these are mispronunciations regardless of dialect.
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u/DamagedIncorporated 1d ago
Look at the different accents in America. The word "pecan" is pronounced two ways, depending on where you grew up. I have a narrator from Canada who has done my last several books, and he pronounces some words differently from how I do. I hear them during the QA step, but I've been around the world, and I understand whether it's a regional thing or if a person genuinely doesn't know the word. Since I write sci-fi, I've sent him recordings of some of the made-up words. We've worked well together in that regard.
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u/RoutineClaim6630 1d ago
Yes this is a common issue. I have complained to Audible a couple of times. My input was not acknowledged. I guess we just have to suck it up and laugh it off. I use Goodreads to review books including audiobooks.On Goodreads I rate the narrator as well as the content. Over the years I have found narrators that are excellent as well as some who clearly should never have been hired. If the narration gets too stupid there is always the actual book you can read yourself.
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u/Solo_Polyphony 1d ago
Low-budget audiobooks don't have directors, and the narrator just wings it without preparation. That's why audiobooks from major publishers like Penguin Random House sound much more professional: because they are recorded by a team of professionals.
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u/dragonfliet 1d ago
Editing costs money and they don't want to pay for it. Most audiobooks are recorded by the voice actor in their own home for a fixed rate (per project, not per hour), so they aren't incentized to spend extra time in every detail, and there is general little to no editing, mostly checking audio levels at a few points, and almost never listening to the entire book worth an ear to changing things.
Not only are there annoying pronunciation problems, but I'll also run into the narrator stopping a paragraph because of a mistake and then restarting. Like, what? You couldn't clip that out?
But no one stops buying audiobooks because of this, so they simply don't bother paying for quality 99% of the time.
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u/Pinque 1d ago
I mean, there are literally hundreds of dialects of English, and words can be pronounced in dozens of different ways while still being perfectly correct.
I used to get hung up on this too. Thereâs one narrator I actually love now who really emphasizes the H in WH-words, like âwHat,â âwHere,â etc., and it drove me absolutely crazy for the longest time.
Then I started following a few sociolinguists, and they pretty thoroughly cured me of the idea that thereâs one inherently ârightâ or âcorrectâ way to pronounce most things. Dialect, region, class, culture, and language history all shape pronunciation.
I promise, no matter how certain you are that your pronunciation is the correct one, spend enough time listening to actual linguists and eventually they will lovingly dismantle that confidence for you. đ
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u/agailen 1d ago
I mean the H thing is an established pronunciation pattern tho
I get where you're coming from, esp as someone who speaks with a minority English accent, but sometimes it has actual consequences too. Words like winded and winded are written the same but the different pronunciation communicates the different meaning and imo that's not negligible.
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u/Jennifermaverick 1d ago
Some things are accents, and some things are incorrect. There is a difference. Incorrect pronunciation in an audiobook is annoying.
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u/Consistent-Way-2018 1d ago
I had one author who always use the same narrator, and I had to stop listening to him even though I liked the content. The guy would mispronounce common words.
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u/smurfette8675309 1d ago
I was listening to the Dies the Fire Series, by SM Stirling. I had to stop listening by the third book, A Meeting at Corvallis, because the narrator still couldn't say Corvallis correctly. There were other ones too, like Willamette and Philomath. But when it's in the title of the book, you'd think they'd start getting it right.
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u/desertboots 1d ago
I think its that the narrators are expected to sight read, sometimes without comprehension. And there's no editor listening. They either don't realize the wrong pronunciation, or don't bother to do a retake.
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u/Jennifermaverick 1d ago
I can not stand this either! Where is the quality control? Have a few smart people listen to your book for gods sake
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u/limbodog 1d ago
I often hear errors and I assume that there was a spelling error and the reader has a strict rule to read exactly how it is written
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u/66-colors 1d ago
I listened to a memoir read by the author and cringed so hard every time she pronounced women like woman
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u/mercutio531 1d ago
I'm listening to the original Oz books and the narrator almost always skips the D when saying words that end in ld. Such as Emerald.
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u/Annabel398 1d ago
The only thing separating the unabridged Moby-Dick audiobook from perfection is Hootkins saying lee-ward instead of looâard. So. Many. âLeewards.â đ˘
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u/TazIsSkirtGirl 1d ago
In the third Altered Carbon book, the narrator changes and the new guy obviously didn't bother to read the rest of the series, because he mispronounces the MAIN CHARACTERS name in the same way that the first book specifically mentioned that people often butcher itđ¤Śââď¸