One of the greatest trials of my (well-paid but painful) work behind the microphone creating English listening practice tapes for Chinese high school students is the recurring ineptitude of the educational publishers we work for.
This is especially conspicuous in their constant inability - or even desire - to attempt to ascribe appropriate English names to the characters in these dialogues.
The Chinese people, almost every single man, woman, and child among them, are completely incapable (because - for so long now - their senior educators and publishers have had no concern for trying to produce accurate and helpful English-language teaching materials) of: a) distinguishing between personal names and surnames; b) distinguishing between female names and male names; c) distinguishing between real names and risible names; and d) using names in appropriate combination with titles.
In my first recording session today, almost every single dialogue had inappropriately allotted character names like Jane, Janice and Eva to the male voice (me!). OK, that was probably a different kind of error: the editors being so stupid or lazy that they had inverted the gender assignations throughout - the parts labelled 'man' should all have been 'woman' and vice versa.
No, a better example came up this afternoon when...... the suspicious death of a 'Dr Jack' was to be investigated by a detective called 'Officer Windy'.
How we laughed! How we cried!
3 comments:
Just curious: what do you do in these circumstances? Do you roll your eyes and keep reading? make corrections in-stream? yell "Cut!" when you come across some truly awful malapropism?
Years ago, I was volunteering at a recording-for-the-blind organization, sitting in a booth and reading technical books aloud into a microphone. It was tricky enough to have to describe important non-verbal objects like screen captures in the book, scattered among the text, especially when you knew that the blind person wouldn't, well, see the screen capture anyway.
But what really made me crazy was finding technical errors in the text. I couldn't correct it mid-stream; there were no allowances for "a note from the audiobook performer"-type asides.
Can't say that every single wince was inaudible, but I did try.
Policy varies. Mostly we try to 'polish' mid-stream.
Sometimes - with smaller errors, or where errors are so numerous that we succumb to fatigue - we don't bother.
Sometimes we are forbidden to change anything because it is feared that the more astute students will notice the divergence from their written text and the publishers may thereby 'lose face' by having their inadequacy exposed.
And sometimes we find our facetious asides incorporated into subsequent scripts. There was a moment today where I - almost subconsciously - amended 'sent' to 'took' where I was describing an off-duty policement who'd tackled a burglar then delivering him to the police station, and then added in a heavy undertone the explanatory comment, "because he wouldn't have gone there on his own."
I expect to see that one coming back to haunt me in a few months.
And that should have been 'emended'....
So tired....
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