Re: Well Said: Pronunciation For Clear Communication Books Pdf File
Macabeo Eastman
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Well Said: Pronunciation For Clear Communication Books Pdf File
Download File https://urlcod.com/2yMcfZ
A workmate once told me about a bad experience he had when he went to an interview for a Junior Graphic Designer position at an Advertising Agency and was turned down because he didn't speak English well. He stated that he noticed a shift in the recruiter's attitude toward him as soon as she realised he didn't have a strong command of the English language. Despite his efforts to explain and detail his work and achievements in his current and previous jobs, she refused to proceed with the interview, citing her discomfort with his "broken English." His works had been lauded by his employers, peers, friends, and the artists' network; but he couldn't stand the rejection.
Being recently shifted to the city and just getting accustomed to the corporate culture, it was a real SHOCK for him. English was not used as a daily spoken language when he was growing up in a village in the south, in Tamil Nadu, or even at work. As I know about him, his work and his creative skills, I felt sad and advised him to work on his communication skill in "ENGLISH" a little more.
Even though I encouraged him to read English books, blogs, and articles and also shared some tried-and-true tips like "watch English stand-up comedies, interviews, reality shows, and the movies with subtitles" through which one can learn a multitude of conversational styles, a question in my mind continued unabated.
English is merely a language; it is a means of communication, not a measure of intelligence or knowledge. The ability to speak English according to a specific grammar and pronunciation standard has nothing to do with intelligence.
To me, humiliating and discriminating against people who can't speak "proper/good/flawless/any other adjectives-English" in a job interview or a common forum where people meet and greet, including on social media platforms, is a CRIME!
In my opinion, the recruiter was wrong in her approach. Speaking in a well-structured and grammatically correct English cannot be a criterion for a 'junior' designer interview candidate. She, being a recruiter who was searching for a designer for a junior position, should be looking at the candidates' skills/knowledge in the specific domain and how well they can articulate their ideas and concepts at work or within a regional/multilingual team, in whatever medium of communication both the parties are comfortable with. As far as both the end could reach an agreement on the concept by using the so-called "broken English," it is a win-win!!
There is a famous Tamil movie comedy dialogue "vellaiya irukiravan poi solla maatan" (The one who is in a fair complexion, won't lie); by and large, this "language thing" is also simply another social stereotype. Some Indians who don't have a good command of English think that the ones who have the same as smart & intelligent without realising the correlation between their intelligence and the form of English they speak.
So, my request to people who think their English is POOR is, please UNDERSTAND it is in no way the measure of your knowledge or intelligence, but purely your language skill. So STOP WORRYING about it.
What is auto-narration of audiobooks and how can it benefit authors and rights-holders as well as listeners? What are some of the common objections to auto-narration and how can we keep a positive attitude to embracing change? Ryan Dingler from Google Play Books goes into detail on these questions and more.
Joanna: It's good to talk to you again. You were on the show in April 2021, talking about publishing on Google Play Books in general. And we just mentioned auto-narration for audio, which was in beta at the time, but we're going to go into that in detail today.
But just to start off, what are auto-narrated audiobooks, it's very simply, instead of being read by a person, auto-narrated audiobooks are read using Google's text-to-speech technology.
We have a whole tool set and framework around building these auto-narrated audiobooks. And this all came about a few years ago, actually, where we noticed just a massive gap between eBooks and audiobooks.
And it's not that we looked into it, some of these eBooks would make sense as an audiobook, it's just that, as most everyone knows, audiobooks are very expensive to create and take a lot of time.
We are just beginning our process, but it is actually available generally in eight countries today. Those countries are the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Spain, and Argentina.
If you are a publisher in one of those countries, and you have an account with us in our partner Centre you can go in and try it out. It's in two languages, English and Spanish, as you might be able to guess, by the countries.
And that your eBook that is now going to become an audiobook has all the things that an audiobook would have and doesn't have, which of course, it's like the Table of Contents, copyright, and things like that.
You've got English and Spanish but so just using English because that's what I was doing. You have different accents as well, don't you? Because of course you and I both speak English, but we both have, well, different genders but also different accents. What are the range of accents available in those languages?
Ryan: We have, I think about six different accents for English language today. Off the top of my head, I think we have American, we have British, we have Indian, Australian, and a few other ones. We have really tried to provide publishers a full-range of accents.
But we're continuing to add more and one word on languages, so we are in English and Spanish only today but we are looking to add German and French and that we're expecting to have those made available by later this year, and in Portuguese as well might be following just after that
Ryan: Yes, exactly. You can change the default narrator speed. I think we have it It can go from roughly 0.5, which is very slow, to 1.5 from the default narrator speed. Each narrator speaks at their own cadence.
We try to give a sense of this by telling them the speed, which is really just the amount of words per minute that they would speak normally. Everyone speaks at different paces. If you like a narrator, but they speak a little bit too slowly, you can speed them up or slow them down either way.
So we have two ways to do it. One is if it's just pronounced wrong, we try to fix that in our system. There's also just personal preference by the publisher or the author. I created this name. I want it spoken this specific way.
We can do that through a few ways. One, if it's like a homograph it can be pronounced in a few different ways. For instance, I always think of tomato/tomato, or if you're British, the way that you pronounce water is very different from an American would pronounce water. So we would have those alternative pronunciations, especially if you do it with a British narrator versus an American narrator.
We've also found that sometimes it's just really hard to phonetically type a pronunciation. So we do have a feature that allows you to speak the pronunciation into your mic if you just only speak that specific word. We try to convert that into our own kind of pronunciation language and capture the meaning or the way that you are trying to pronounce the word. I always like to think of when Harry Potter came out, everyone was pronouncing Hermione as Hermon-e,
Joanna: This is kind of magic. I've been narrating audiobooks now for a few years, and also working with narrators. And there's this horrible moment if you're working with a human narrator and you realize you haven't told them how you wanted a name to be pronounced.
So there are a lot of speeds, as you say. And that's humans are humans, they make human noises. But it is interesting how I just love that universal change. I think that that is a killer app, basically.
Ryan: One thing that I always like to point out too is if you have a mistake in a traditional audiobook and you realize it post-publishing, you're probably not going to fix it, it takes a lot of time. It depends on the severity of what you would see as the mistake.
With an auto-narrated audiobook, all you need to do is go back and change the one word or the same that was pronounced in a way that you would have wanted differently. And you can publish it again, download the files, and it takes a matter of minutes to fix those types of errors.
So, if you as a publisher, an author can afford to invest in a full audiobook production with a professional narrator, we would highly encourage you to do so and of course encourage you to sell that audiobook on our platform.
Many people's experience with text-to-speech comes from the earliest versions of text to speech that they heard, which did sound very robotic and were quite hard to listen to for long periods of time.
But text-to-speech quality does vary significantly in terms of quality. It also has improved a lot over the intervening years since it was first introduced. Google has been working on text-to-speech for 15 plus years and seen lots of progress over that time.
Google has been particularly invested in text-to-speech because it's in so many of our products with Google Assistant across a wide range of products, You can speak and hear back from the device that you're speaking into. So Google has invested significantly, and we do think that the quality has improved drastically. And Google we do think stands out quite a bit.
I think the most important thing is if you're curious is just to listen to it yourself. You can always go to our partner center, we have a ton of samples, sort of different narrators, quality does vary by narrator, but we found it's really a matter of personal preference. Some people prefer one narrator, others prefer another. But just go listen to yourself if you're curious about it.
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