Trenchwork

DH just showed me this, and I have to take two minutes from commenting on essays to share it.

Norway’s Kristiansand county (kommune) has a really nifty web page. Seriously. It’s clean, well organized (for the most part), and easy to access. They’ve also added an ultra-cool feature: a voice-over. All you have to do is highlight the text you want voiced, then click the little forward “play” button just above the menu bar:

It’s a nifty ability for those who might be visually disabled. The computer-generated voice is clear, distinct, and actually does a decent job. If you’re interested in hearing what Norwegian sounds like, this is a good (computer-generated) sample.

But if you’d like to have some fun with it, click the “In English” option for the page, then highlight the text you want read and click the play button. Now you’re in trouble. The same voice does the reading, but all syllables are pronouned with Norwegian intonations—which pretty effectively makes the English totally incomprehensible.

Some of the pronounciations are absolutely hilarious, but let me warn you that if you try and locate where the reading is in the text, you’re going to have a difficult time of it unless you pick up on a key word or two and scan from the top of the highlighted section to find it. I’m torn between laughing uncontrollably and just shaking my head at it. I wonder how long it’s going to stay like that, or whether they’ll come up with an English alternative?

It does, however, point out how important pronounciation can be, and that while we tend to think accents are charming (even downright sexy), we must still be able to understand the person.

PS: If you test the page and find it takes forever to load or returns a busy server error message, give it some time and try it again, or try it again in a day or two. The information about the page just came out in one of the newspapers (Dagbladet, if I remember correctly) yesterday, and I’m betting the site is being overrun with requests.