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Provide speakers etc. with way to submit or point at name pronunciations #70
Description
Lots of discomfort with name pronunciations, or at least I'm noticing it more than last year. We should provide for any top-line people whose names are going to get read some way to give us (that is, emcees) a pronunciation of it. (I say "top-line people" to include other than presenters. e.g. Scholarship recipients.)
Namecoach is one app, but I have 0 (zero) idea whether there are problems with it.
It may be that this isn't a tech issue but a process/policy issue. i.e. Maybe we should change how we introduce speakers so we don't have to have those awkward and possibly problematic emcee moments. I'm inclined toward asking emcees to learn the pronunciations as courtesy.
Activity
phette23 commentedon Mar 12, 2025
It would be nice to have pronunciation audio on the site but I don't think it solves the problem of volunteers knowing how to pronounce names, because they're usually not reading them off of the website. That needs to be in the MC / other docs. I believe this has been done in past years, at least I seem to recall reading off phonetic scholarship recipient names in 2019, but it would need to happen in committees. I think I saw someone mention the Program Committee should add pronunciation to their speaker info form.
triplingual commentedon Mar 12, 2025
The recording idea (which seems like it may get used by IIIF this year, so I may be able to comment in June about how it works) would be for prepping MCs. As in, for a speaker block, they get pointed to a set of recordings for learning names. This may conflict with the lead time or lack thereof that MCs have before getting up to the lectern.
triplingual commentedon Mar 12, 2025
(Or at least that's how I'm thinking of it. Mostly I just want MCs to have the correct pronunciations available to them. The vector for that is not super-meaningful to me rn, and can be optimized later.)