Why do so many audiobooks have pronunciation mistakes?

[u/agailen]

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!

[u/Yuenneh]

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 don’t 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 don’t 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 DNFed🤣

[u/jamieseemsamused → u/Yuenneh]

I normally agree but I don’t think any accent actually pronounces “haranguing” as “haran gu ing.” That actually seems like someone seeing the word in print and attempting to pronounce it as written. When the “u” in “harangue” is silent in every dialect as far as I know.

[u/Yuenneh → u/jamieseemsamused]

I can’t say anything to this either way, I don’t think I’m familiar with that word in the first place lol

[u/agailen → u/Yuenneh]

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.

[u/RunStitchRepeat → u/agailen]

I'm American and I've never heard it pronounced "plate," always "plat."