Prooflistening

[Frank Abate]

Benjamin Barrett said:

>>

I thought I spotted a new word on the Honyaku mailing list today where a
translator was talking about prooflistening his translation work against
the original. Google shows 32 hits, though. Another translator informed
the list that he has been edit listening for years. It appears that word
has not yet made it to Google...

<<

We used this word (see the Preface, p. vii, for "proof-listened") to
describe the activity that was done to check the pronunciations in the
Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names (ed. by John Bollard, Omnigraphics,
1993).  Thanks to software and facilities provided by AT&T Bell Labs,
through the good offices of Ken Church, Richard Sproat, and others there, we
were able to check the IPA prons in the dictionary by feeding them into the
Bell Labs system and listening to the result.  We dubbed this
"prooflistening".  It worked.  Katherine Isaacs, who was an associate editor
on the dictionary, had the unenviable task of sitting down for about a week
and listening as the system pronounced every one of 23,000+ entries at her,
while she looked at the entry itself.  The system turned up incorrect IPA
realizations, as long as you knew how the entry item was supposed to sound.

I considered this a nonce usage at the time, but it seems another
application has arisen.

Frank