George MacDonald's novels with Scotch in them

Readaholic · Post by **Readaholic** » March 28th, 2007, 10:22 pm

Hi everyone,

I would like to find out what the Librivox policy would be on books like Malcom by George MacDonald. I would dearly love to do some of his books for Librivox but I don't speak Scotch. And besides, most listeners would not understand the details of the speech without actually seeing it on a page. I just now am doing a few chapters of Ranald Bannerman's boyhood and there are a couple of Scotch songs in it. There, I tried to pronounce the words exactly as they were written but the song will not be easily understood by the listener.

My idea is that for the novels, I could pronounce the words a little differently, for example "whaur" is "where", "heid" is "head", etc so that the listener will understand what is going on. I would include enough of the accent as possible and only change words if they risk not being understood. And where there is a footnote for a word, I could say (at the end of the sentence) "footnote: ee means eye". Or I could just simply use the translated word directly in the sentence and not say "footnote" at all. Tell me what is best.

Of course this takes a tremendous amount of work but MacDonald is one of my favorite authors. So please let me hear from several of you if this would be acceptable. If it is, I will choose one of the novels to do solo.

If you want me to send a sample before making a decision, please let me know.

Thanks,

jimmowatt · Post by **jimmowatt** » March 29th, 2007, 12:37 am

Goodness!
This is an interesting one.
First point I should make is that if you love the books then you surely must record them.
We will find a way.

As to policy.
The only one which has any connection to this would be the one that says we don't change the text. Pronunciations can be different but the word must remain the same.

Soooo

How to do this

1. Just go ahead and read it pronouncing things the best you can.
2. Post messages on here and possibly on other bulletin boards too asking for scots readers to help out (there's no reason why your recording can't be you with some other person reading sections).
I'd suggest posting on the help wanted section on here plus rove the net looking for any Macdonald connections and see who you can find.
3. Ask for pronunciation help - If you post a list of words then quite likely someone will send you an audio file with an interpretation of those words. Then you can practise copying them for your recording.
4. Scour the catalog and archive.org for scots dialect recordings. We've got a fair collection of Burns I think. Not all are recorded by people from Scotland but they'll give you a good idea of what people have done so far.

5 Do it and enjoy it

I'd carry on recording what you're doing but leave the songs out for now (you can always edit them in later) while you look at some of the options above.

Starlite · Post by **Starlite** » March 29th, 2007, 2:32 am

Wow, this is so cool. I tried reading some of the books with the dialect in them but just could not get through them. It would be great if we can do an Englishized (?) version.

Readaholic · Post by **Readaholic** » April 1st, 2007, 10:59 pm

Thanks Jim and Starlite for your comments and suggestions.

These ideas are helpful and I will see what I can do to follow up on some of them.

best regards,