Procuring Proper Pronunciation In a Pinch

 I’ve spent alot of time recently doing voiceovers for a particular client of ours that develops and markets a very technical product.  They asked us to convert 100s of PowerPoint slides for web delivery from their website.  Not a big deal of course, as we happen to market a software product ourselves that does just that!

 But back to the voiceover part; I have a voice that some say is a “good radio voice.”  Personally, I think that’s a bit of a stretch since I’ve never taken any kind of training in this area, however, it’s a pretty deep voice, and people just seem to think it works, so I roll with it.

"Strateger, stategi, straTEEgery... dog gonnit!"

 So after converting all of the PowerPoints in to Ignite, I began to do the voiceovers and immediately ran in to words like “hysteresis”, “magnetodielectric” and my personal favorite “anisotropic”.  These words don’t come up in normal conversation, at least not in my circles, so I was stopped dead in my tracks until I could find someone that could tell me how these words are pronounced.

 On a whim, I just Googled “anisotropic pronunciation.”  YAY!  The dictionary sites online, most of them anyway, now offer a little pronunciation icon (looks like a little speaker) near the phonetic representation of the word.  Some of the sites are overseas, so you can even get pronunciations in UK English, and more.  I was back to work!

 Here are a few of the sites I used during the process:

http://forvo.com/
http://www.dictionary.com
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/

There are more of course, but these were most helpful.

So there’s no excuse anymore.  If you find yourself needing how to say “Magnetodielectric flux controller compounds are anisotropic and are therefore useful for controlling hysteresis heating” you’re in luck!