Audible Sigh

I've decided to pick up the gauntlet that Elizabeth at Cville Words threw down and make a second blog entry in the space of two days. Don't get used to it, Elizabeth!

I have been subscribing to a podcast of the New Yorker for several months now. The podcast is a paid subscription from Audible.com. In general, I've been satisfied with the content, except that in every issue there is at least one glaring pronunciation error, sometimes more. I've been gritting my teeth and trying to ignore this, figuring that it was unlikely I would be able to get a complaint to the right person.

Finally, one day in a fit of avoiding doing anything productive, I decided to send an email to customer service at Audible.

Here is an excerpt:

"At least two or three times each issue (some worse than others) the reader will mangle a word. It is very very annoying. I don't know who does the production of these podcasts, but SOMEBODY needs to edit them (listen) and check the pronunciations. It is especially awful for foreign words (the movie "Volver", for example, was pronounced as if it were the last two syllables of the word "revolver". Ouch) and also names (the current issue calls the movie actor Seth Rogan something that sounds like Rojen). Especially when a word is repeated throughout an article, it gets almost physically painful. I had to stop listening to a story that took place in the Mexican state of Oaxaca (pronounced like "Waháca") when the reader kept pronouncing it something like Owáxica. Ouch. Please please impose some quality control here. If the readers don't look up the words they aren't sure of, then somebody needs to check afterward."

OK, that was grumpy. So sue me. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a very nice reply a couple of days later from the person who produces the podcasts. Apparently the policy is to provide pronunciation help for readers on problematic words and names and also to listen for errors afterward. All well and good, I pointed out, but not thorough enough.

I was then passed on to another person at Audible who I was told would soon be taking over the production of the podcasts. I sent him a link to Merriam-Webster Online which has audio files for pronunciation of almost all the words. This would have prevented all the mistakes I had caught except for the Spanish word "Volver". Things like that make me wonder, though, about the general cultural literacy of the readers and the producers. Before the film "Volver" came out, there were interviews and reviews on NPR and probably other media that might have clued in anybody who had heard at least one.

I felt good about having perhaps contributed to a better podcast product and left it at that...until the next issue when there was a review of the Broadway play Frost/Nixon starring Frank Langella, which they pronounced with a hard "g" (like "go") instead of Lanjella, which I was able to easily confirm at the Library of Congress's web page entitle Say How? A Pronunciation Guide to Names of Public Figures.

Of course I forwarded this on to the producers but did not get a response. Now every time I listen there are instances of words that I am not sure of, because I don't have a print copy of the magazine in front of me to check it. The reason I don't just subscribe to the print magazine? I used to, but I was so buried in issues that I hadn't gotten around to reading that I had to quit. Which is worse, the annoyance of mispronunciations or the piles of paper lying around the house?

At least the responses from Audible were extremely courteous and pleasant, if they didn't completely fix the problem. That's more than I usually expect from any sort of customer service these days.