On the front lines of the battle against “Russian” English
How do you pronounce the name of Russia’s capital?
If you think it rhymes with “Ross Cow,” I regret to inform you that internationally, people loathe this pronunciation: it should sound like “Toss Doe.” I’ve grown accustomed to this one change over the last several years, so it’s not a problem for me. However, I’ve had issues in voiceover work with how I’ve pronounced “reservoir” and whether or not words ending in “t” have, well, a “t” put on them. Names from the UK can also pose a problem, but I’m generally good with “Glasgow” and all four of Edinburgh’s syllables.
One way to avoid hiccups that can, at best, make a recording session run long and, at worst, derail a professional relationship, is to provide your performers with their scripts beforehand.
A couple of Saturdays ago, I received 10 of them.
I am 100% against working extra or sacrificing your free time for wage-earning. However, this week was special because I was going to Moscow for the second year in a row to provide audio for an upcoming edition of a textbook.
You might think that the main problem in doing voiceover or dubbing for Russian media is pronouncing unfamiliar words in the original language. With two years of university Russian under my belt, this isn’t really an issue (when provided with a script and sympathetic listeners). What can cause conflict is having different expectations about pronunciation.
I decided to give the scripts a read-through, which first required isolating the third of the 30 that I was responsible for. While much of the text involved just giving instructions, other parts required producing more natural speech. And here I saw many areas that needed improvement. Some things that caught my eye turned out to just be differences in US versus UK English (which is the standard, sort of, in Russia).
There were some errors with number agreement but nothing major.
I found exactly one article out of place: “the Nevsky Prospect”
One especially chaotic chart settled, I think, whether it is appropriate to say “so much as” when making a comparison:
Some other choices weren’t so dramatic. The original “logistics centre” sounded off to me, so I did a little digging and found that “logistics hub” was more common.
However, in another place, what stood out was an error in discourse marking. The scenario is that one person is leaving a voicemail message for their parter in a school project. The messages, as originally scripted, went something like this:
Hi, how are you? I haven’t seen you in a while. By the way…
It then goes on to discuss, in detail, several details about the project, including the speaker’s opinion about the issue at hand. This isn’t a problem, of course, but note “by the way.” It’s in almost every script like this.
It doesn’t make sense.
You use “by the way” to interject something unrelated to the topic at hand. You can’t use it to introduce the purpose of your speech.
Similarly, in another activity, a robocall begins “It is __________” when introducing itself, rather than saying “This is.” It seems minor, but I don’t think a native English speaker would ever say that.
So why is this the case in the book? Because the Russian equivalents look like this:
Similarly, the robocaller says “Please answer five questions.” Which five? For this to be an intelligible command, it would need to say “Answer the following/next” five questions.
Another weird facet of Russian English also popped up: using “citizens” instead of people.
These synonyms are totally unacceptable in English. As per Cambridge, a citizen is:
a person who is a member of a particular country and who has rights because of being born there or because of being given rights, or a person who lives in a particular town or city
Related definitions double down on a “citizen” being a member of a political community and not at all another word for “person” or “human being.”
There was an entire section about “communicating,” which, you can guess, was fraught.
While it doesn’t necessarily require a native speaker to catch these errors and instances of awkwardness, it does require someone. The issue isn’t intelligibility so much as it is preventing learners from stumbling into a kind of path dependency, where fossilized errors are presented and reinforced as “correct” through authorities like teachers and textbooks.
Recently I was asked to consider mentoring high school students interested in taking exams to enroll in American colleges. What better way to instantly “other” yourself than by using “Russian” English, when more natural collocations and options exist?
It’s the social friction that these kinds of choices inspire that students should avoid, and the best way to help them do that is to cut off the problem at the source.
