As an experienced professional voiceover I’ve long been accustomed to the problems with pronunciation you can encounter when recording voice-over narration for videos with medical or pharmaceutical content.
Sentences like this are quite common:
“It has been suggested that dimerization promotes the autophosphorylation of the tyrosine kinase domain of ALK, via the recruitment of ATP”.
You need to take a deep breath and have a metaphorical run-up for a sentence like that.
This week I’ve been providing the voiceover for a new module in the Zenosis series I’ve been asked to record. My problem this week was not with polysyllabic medical terms but with a succession of acronyms.
The content of the module I was recording concerns applying for permission to market medicinal products in the European Union. You need to use a particular format for the submission – it’s a Common Technical Document, or CDT. You can use an electronic version of it – which is an eCDT. The content has to be structured according to something called a DTD. The combination of CDT DTD is actually quite hard to say.
But I certainly needed the “deep breath and metaphorical run up” when I got to a sentence that began:
“The XML eCTD DTD defines the overall structure….”
At that point I was only on page 6 out of a 28 page script – I was hoping it wasn’t going to get worse than that and luckily for me it didn’t.
Still I think XML eCTD DTD is probably a good workout for the tongue and face muscles!