Seeking beta-listener for my BB podfic (July)

[desireearmfeldt]

Would anybody out there be interested in beta-ing my Big Bang podfic?  It is (warning) THREE HOURS and change of F/K/V kink-negotiation by helens78 (Out of Nowhere).  I will have already done a round of self-beta-and-editing before passing it off to you.  Ideally, getting feedback sometime in July would be great.

I would be particularly gratetful for someone who can be fairly picky about the audio equivalent of spelling-and-grammar check: listening for departures from the text, mispronounciations, distracting mouth or background noises, volume weirdness and the like.  Comments about where the acting could use improvement would also be welcome.

Thank you kindly!

Comments

[feroxargentea]

I could do this if you have no other takers. A US beta would probably be better, though, because I can't reliably tell the difference between mispronunciations and American/Canadian pronunciations. But I could say "this bit sounds wrong to me".

[desireearmfeldt]

Thanks for the offer -- I'll see if I can recruit someone else, & let you know.

(Though I think the Brit/Yank divide should not be too much of an issue: I'm confident I have not mispronounced *random* words, and am more concerned about things like whether I've consistently juggled the "different characters say Fraser's name differently" phenomenon. :) )

[feroxargentea]

Fraser's name? See above re: Yanks are strange :)

[desireearmfeldt]

It's a running joke in the show: RayV and Frannie (and maybe some other American characters as well), mispronounce Fraser's name, in the sense of not pronouncing it the same way he does himself. He says FRAY-zer, they say FRAY-zhure. RayK (and some other characters) say FRAY-zer, like Fraser himself does.

Because I'm a glutton for self-punishment, I've usually tried to implement that in podfics featuring RayV or Frannie. :)

[feroxargentea]

He says FRAY-zer, they say FRAY-zhure.

I had gathered that much, but the *why* is still a mystery. (Also the *how* - I can't quite put extra letters into it, however hard I try :)

Way more rambling about language than anyone asked for :)

[desireearmfeldt]

It's not really extra letters: I'm using "zh" to represent a single consonant sound (phoneme) that I don't have a good single letter for. If we were in French, it would be "j" and all would be much simpler. :) What I don't get -- and this actually has tripped me up in podficcing before -- is how to wrap my mouth around "Frayzh."

Anyway, I'm not sure how much more of a "because" there is than "different accents pronounce certain words differently in predictable ways," especially with names, which are often pronounced bizarrely for all sorts of historical reasons.

I mean, I think the point in due South is to make a joke about (a certain kind of) American accent vs. (a certain kind of) Canadian accent. But each country has so many regional accents that it's hard to actually joke about it.

For example, if I saw the name "Fraser" written, without due South having called all this to my attention, I would totally say FRAY-zer. If someone said "FRAY-zhure" to me out loud...I'm not sure whether my instinct would be to write "Fraser" (which I don't pronounce that way) or "Frasier" (which I *do* pronounce that way, but is a less common-to-me name. Except for the fact that there was a famous TV show Called "Frasier," which I never saw.)

But, let me think of another example... One could pronounce "azure" as AZ-yure, or as AZH-ure. I've heard both, and maybe the former is more brit and the latter more Yank, but I bet it's not consistent across either country. Possibly also related, my husband and I were quoting the Monty Python line today: "we don't morally censure, we just want the money." The English actor pronounces it CEN-syure, which sounds very British to my ears. I would normally say CEN-shure, and I think that's what most (US) people I know say, too.

(CEN-sure, that is with an s rather than a sh, is how I would pronounce "censor" or "censer," and I think there Brit and Yank more or less agree? It's also how I usually pronounce "sensor," though I think I can be influenced into saying that SEN-sor, and maybe the same for "censor" if it's a noun rather than a verb.)

This is reminding me of the one linguistics class I took in college (or, shall we say, "at University" :) ). The teaching assistant in charge of my recitation section was Australian, with a pretty strong accent; the students were all or mostly Americans. One day, he was going over a list of consonant sounds, and he got to "zh." The example given for this was "garage," -- which I and many, but not all, Americans pronounce gah-RAHZH. We're all nodding along, but the teaching assistant says, "I don't understand why they give this as an example, but that's what the book says" -- because, of course, *he* pronounces it gah-RADGE. (Not, as far as I remember, GA-ridge, which I've heard some Englishpeople say. I'm pretty sure the emphasis was on the second syllable.)

The funny thing was, it took us several back-and-forths to figure out/explain what was going on, because for some people, including the TA, both pronunciations were recognizable as the word "garage," to the extent that they had a hard time hearing the difference in pronunciation.

And come to think of it, I totally say gah-RAZH, so why is FRAYZH to hard for me to spit out? They're nearly identical! Weird...

Re: Way more rambling about language than anyone asked for :)

[feroxargentea]

I meant extra letters as in, in the Vecchios' mouths it sounds like a mangled version of "Frasier" rather than "Fraser".

Censure - sen-syuh if I'm speaking carefully, sen-shuh if not, because there's a big laziness factor there :) Censor, censer and sensor would all be sen-suh? And the garage is the GA-ridge to my wife, the GA-rahj to me, and the ga-RAHJ only if we're taking the piss.

I totally say gah-RAZH, so why is FRAYZH to hard for me to spit out? They're nearly identical! Weird...

I guess it's whether something's out of place to you or not? Like the "ch" in loch - most English people are perfectly capable of making the right sound in other circumstances, but we're just used to saying "lock".

(Which takes me back to Fraser. Two ways here: Fraser or Frrrraser. My grandmother (a Fraser from Dundee) used to laugh at my inability to roll the R. She'd say "ach child, you'll never make a Frrrrraser". To which I would tell her that if she didn't want English grandchildren she shouldn't have married an Englishman.)

Re: Way more rambling about language than anyone asked for :)

[desireearmfeldt]

The thing that kills me most often in podfic (so far)?

"Fraser's shoulders" in Vecchio-pronounciation (though that s-sh combo is hard in any case).

(Which takes me back to Fraser. Two ways here: Fraser or Frrrraser. My grandmother (a Fraser from Dundee) used to laugh at my inability to roll the R. She'd say "ach child, you'll never make a Frrrrraser". To which I would tell her that if she didn't want English grandchildren she shouldn't have married an Englishman.)

Hee! I guess, technically, we're all pronouncing it wrong. :)

Re: Way more rambling about language than anyone asked for :)

[feroxargentea]

Fraser's shoulders - ha, yeah, very She Sells Seashells *g*

I did once have a short story podded that was full of botanical names, and wished they'd been harder ones, just for the entertainment value. Personal challenge was to get Pseudotsuga menziesii into a fic one day - which is how this damn BB fic of mine got started. Stupid thing that I should have remembered: the bloody tree wasn't even called that till later...

[desireearmfeldt]

Hello again! If the beta offer is still open, I'd like to take you up on it. :) If you're willing, could you drop me an email at desireearmfeldt AT livejournal DOT com so we can coordinate logistics?

Many thanks!