Couldn’t really think of a decent, short title, so going basic.
It’s a warm Friday, and I’m not sure if it’s time to call it unseasonably warm or not, considering how warm the past few years of Fall have been. We get Summer, then it’s Winter.
So it’s been a good week, getting another book finished, although I had to deal with an overwrought throat earlier in the week. It never seems to strike when people are looking for a Sam Elliot soundalike, and that would really be beneficial one of these times. Oh well, eventually another western will come my way.
Been reading the book Shogun, still digging my way through it. Made me think about the amount of time that one would need to invest to create an audiobook of it. Ralph Lister is the narrator’s name, and I have to applaud how the guy was able to juggle back and forth between English, Spanish, and Japanese. I narrated a wonderful book, BESA, that involved having to take a crash course in Albanian pronunciation, and that was TOUGH. Thankfully, I had the author teach me the pronunciations, as opposed to working off of a dictionary, but there was still a steep learning curve. And no, I can’t speak conversational Albanian at this point.
Another was a more recent book, The People of Ostrich Mountain, where I had to learn some Kenyan. Amazingly, I had an easier time with Kenyan than I did with Albanian. Another book I recently finished had Babylonian, Greek, Portuguese…finding the pronunciations for those (especially Babylonian) was a chore, but I eventually found them.
One of the perks of the job, at least, that’s how I look at it. If you’re pronouncing it right, then it makes it that much more realistic for the listener, even if you don’t understand the language.