I’m so excited that I get a chance to rant about this!!!

I’m listening to the Audible version of Anna Karenina, and Maggie Gyllenhaal (the narrator) mispronounces everyone’s name to the point that it is insanely grating as a Russian speaker.

I do NOT expect someone who is not a speaker of a language to pronounce names perfectly. However, this is not a case of not being able to pronounce the sounds properly or an accent. The syllable stresses are wrong on almost every name. For example she says “aLEKsey alexanDROvich” instead of " alekSEY aleXANdrovich". This is the case for pretty much every name. For an English example, this is like if a character’s name is “Steven Johnson” and the narrator pronounces it “stee-VEN john-SON”. Or pronouncing “Olivia Sanders” as “oli-VIA san-DERS”. For the whole book. Grating.

Here’s the thing. It is natural that a native English speaker would place the stresses incorrectly when trying to pronounce a Russian word, because the languages are totally different. I don’t really even blame the narrator. I do blame Audible… this is a professional production. They had the money to hire a famous actress to read the text, but couldn’t pay a Russian grad student a couple hundred bucks on Fiverr to provide a phonetic pronunciation guide for the characters’ names??! Come on…