Spelling mistakes
I have been thinking of posting on this point for a while, I was waiting for a real howler. The other morning I noticed they had "David Davies" (the Kinks guitarist?).
What bothers me even more is the weirdness of pronunciation you sometimes get. Poor ole Emma is the champion, of course: she always says "Nikkei" as if it's German, but she has recently pronounced Danube as D'nube and Kabul as K'bool... even when introducing packages or interviews with people who pronounce them properly. But all presenters seem to approach pronunciation on an every-man-for-himself basis. A case in point recently has been Jean-Charles de Menezes: the "Charles", in particular, sometimes came out in French, sometimes in English and only rarely in Portuguese... which seems to be two syllables (Char-l?s).
For a broadcast medium, consistency in pronunciation is surely as important as coherent spelling in a print medium. Why can't Sky have some sort of database for the pronunciation of foreign names. It could then feed phonetic transcriptions into the scripts. Poor old Emma might still h ave problems, but most of the others would probably manage.
Incidentally, a couple of years ago Martin Stanford had to read a bit of business news in which he had to say the name of a major French building and communications conglomerate, Bouygues. He made a right balls-up, saying something like "Boogies" instead of the way it actually is pronounced, "BWEEG". It ought to be familiar to Sky: not only is it the operator of one of France's three cellphone networks, it is also the owner of TF1, the leading French TV channel. I sent an e-mail in case he had to read it again, and within a frw minutes he had fired off the following reply:
"Thanks for your note: I had rehearsed the word - then flunked it on air!
Next time round our Biz Editor Mike Wilson will be handling the subject and
I'm sure he'll make a much better job of it."
He did!
What bothers me even more is the weirdness of pronunciation you sometimes get. Poor ole Emma is the champion, of course: she always says "Nikkei" as if it's German, but she has recently pronounced Danube as D'nube and Kabul as K'bool... even when introducing packages or interviews with people who pronounce them properly. But all presenters seem to approach pronunciation on an every-man-for-himself basis. A case in point recently has been Jean-Charles de Menezes: the "Charles", in particular, sometimes came out in French, sometimes in English and only rarely in Portuguese... which seems to be two syllables (Char-l?s).
For a broadcast medium, consistency in pronunciation is surely as important as coherent spelling in a print medium. Why can't Sky have some sort of database for the pronunciation of foreign names. It could then feed phonetic transcriptions into the scripts. Poor old Emma might still h ave problems, but most of the others would probably manage.
Incidentally, a couple of years ago Martin Stanford had to read a bit of business news in which he had to say the name of a major French building and communications conglomerate, Bouygues. He made a right balls-up, saying something like "Boogies" instead of the way it actually is pronounced, "BWEEG". It ought to be familiar to Sky: not only is it the operator of one of France's three cellphone networks, it is also the owner of TF1, the leading French TV channel. I sent an e-mail in case he had to read it again, and within a frw minutes he had fired off the following reply:
"Thanks for your note: I had rehearsed the word - then flunked it on air!
Next time round our Biz Editor Mike Wilson will be handling the subject and
I'm sure he'll make a much better job of it."
He did!
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sky_news_nut
- Posts: 56
- Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2005 4:15 pm