Still, it’s typical of people who don’t speak a language (particularly people who only speak English) to put everything else in the same basket. It wasn’t that she was a bad actress, it was just that she read every Portuguese word like it was Spanish. The Brazilians I get (at least they still speak Portuguese, albeit with a different accent and some idiom differences here and there), but the Colombian actress just sent me. Four actresses were of Brazilian descent, and one was of Colombian descent. However…īack when ACOR got audio, I had 5 samples to choose from. Yeah, I’m not surprised about this shitty situation, and I’m glad Xiran is speaking out.ĭisclaimer: I love the actress who narrated A CURSE OF ROSES.
![tumblr search tumblr search](https://www.theme-junkie.com/wp-content/uploads/how-to-search-multiple-tags-on-tumblr-330x220.png)
Just know that in the current version, all the Mandarin is wrong. If you’re wondering whether to get the Zachary Ying audiobook after finding out about this…Eh. They took the audiobook down from retailers for a bit but I told them it can stay up for now as long as the buyers can automatically get the new version later. I do like the VA’s performance, it’s just a shame about the Mandarin. Publishers have a LOT of work to do beyond presenting surface-level diversity, smh. Or like…didn’t suggest Japanese and Korean VAs for my very Chinese book. Now my publisher is working on finding an actual Mandarin speaker to rerecord the whole audiobook and I’m just so frustrated because this could’ve been avoided so easily if they’d taken my concern seriously from the start. I even painstakingly sent my publisher a list and a recording of every Mandarin term or phrase in the book, organized by page, but clearly no one involved in production could differentiate the tones because they all came out wrong. Mandarin is a tonal language, so if you don’t hit the tone right you are saying something completely different. When I raised the issue to my publisher, they said it was the VA’s team that assured them they could handle Mandarin (they definitely cannot). Or SOMEONE in the production chain lied, because the final product was clearly done by a Japanese person who could not speak Mandarin. It did give me pause that that VA’s bio said they were born in Tokyo, but I thought maybe the VA was Chinese-Japanese or something because my publisher wouldn’t lie to me, right?
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My publisher assured me they can all handle Mandarin, so I just chose the voice that seemed most suitable for Zack. I’m pretty annoyed by this because when my publisher first sent me a list of four candidates to choose from, I suspected pretty quickly that they were all either Japanese or Korean, so I asked if any of them were native Mandarin speakers because there’s a LOT of Mandarin in the book so that’s rather important. I didn’t discover this until several days after the audiobook went on sale because they never sent me a sample of the VA reading any Mandarin or a preview of the audiobook before it was finished. Turns out my publisher got a JAPANESE VOICE ACTOR to narrate the audiobook, which means all the Mandarin is pronounced wrong.
![tumblr search tumblr search](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/af/16/5a/af165aef28125be784c1633f34a45cb7.gif)
(Nvm, decided to go public on Twitter about this after all.
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(Please do not screenshot this to share on Twitter because I don’t want this to become a Whole Thing there)