the Russian gaze

[John Dunn]

I cannot comment on ESPN, but what helps British 
commentators is not so much their training, as 
the fact that they routinely seek advice from 
their foreign counterparts.  Of course, they can 
reproduce only what they hear or what they think 
they hear: a few years ago a Glasgow journalist 
asked Celtic's Polish-born player Dariusz 
Wdowczyk how his name was pronounced, but heard 
the answer as  'Dovchek',* which thereafter 
became the standard.  There are other names that 
don't survive this process: SharApova and 
KuznetsOva are a stress too far, and AbramOvich 
is a totally lost cause.  On the question of Del 
Piero, I don't know if Katarina Peitlova would 
agree, but to my untrained ear the sequence in 
question sounds more like a Slovak diphthong than 
a Russian /je/.

John Dunn.

*Which casts an interesting light on how 
anglophones perceive certain initial consonant 
clusters .


>Sarah Hurst wrote:
>
>>Regarding the spelling of footballers' names, I do think that in
>>international sport, the players have their own preferences in
>>transliteration and that's the reason for it.
>>As for pronunciation, I think ESPN commentators just aren't making any real
>>effort at all. The BBC may be better because I know that they actually train
>>their presenters on pronunciation and they have pronunciation guides. Today
>>an ESPN commentator repeatedly referred to "Del Peero" while the woman
>>commentator they had said "Del Pi-ero", which I believe is correct.
>>
>>I don't even think the ESPN commentators could recognize the German
>>chancellor. They never pointed her out although the camera has cut to her
>>repeatedly.
>
>This has been going on at ESPN for years -- no 
>matter what sport they cover, they make no 
>effort whatsoever to determine the correct 
>pronunciation. So the broadcasters take a look 
>at the letters on the page and guess. Some of 
>them seem to throw them up in the air and 
>pronounce them in whatever order they fall 
>(metasethizing at will), following English 
>spelling rules. I can understand when they don't 
>know the number 278 player in the world, but I 
>find it especially offensive that they can't 
>even get top players like "Sharapova" and top 
>models like "Kournikova" right. I can only 
>conclude that it's company policy -- it's too 
>consistent to be anything else.
>
>As for "del Piero," it has three syllables in 
>all (not four), stress on the second "e." A 
>faithful Russian transliteration would be 
>"”Âθ-è¸Â•Ó." Google has 188,000 hits for "ÑÂθ 
>è¸Â•Ó," which is close enough.
>
>--
>War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
>--
>Paul B. Gallagher
>pbg translations, inc.
>"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
>http://pbg-translations.com
>
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-- 
John Dunn
School of Modern Languages and Cultures (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow
Hetherington Building
Bute Gardens
Glasgow
G12 8RS
United Kingdom

Telephone: +44 (0)141 330 5591/330 5418
Fax: +44 (0)141 330 2297
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk

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