VOA慢速英语:An Archive of English, Spoken in Many Different Accents

Steven Weinberger is the director of linguistics in the English Department at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Professor Weinberger says students in his beginning phonetics class are mostly interested in teaching English as a second language. They wanted to study how non-native speakers pronounce different sounds.
Steven Weinberger是乔治梅森大学英语系语言学主任，该校位于弗吉尼亚州费尔法克斯县。STEVEN WEINBERGER教授表示，语言学入门发音班中大部分学生对于教英语为第二语言者很感兴趣，他们想要研究英语为非母语的人如何发音。

STEVEN WEINBERGER: "So we sent the students out to record non-native speakers, and we compared those speakers to each other and to native speakers of English."
STEVEN WEINBERGER: “于是我们派学生给非母语人士录音并相互比较，然后再同英语母语人士比较。”

Professor Weinberger wrote a paragraph for all of the speakers to read. The paragraph uses common words but contains almost all of the sounds used in English. Here is that sixty-nine-word paragraph read by our own Bob Doughty:
STEVEN WEINBERGER教授写了一段短文让所有人朗读。这段短文使用一些常用词，但却包含了英语使用的几乎所有的发音。以下是由我同事Bob Doughty朗读的这段69个单词的短文：

BOB DOUGHTY: "Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids.She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station."
Bob Doughty：“请致电斯特拉，让她从商店购买这些东西：六匙新鲜荷兰豆，五大块蓝纹奶酪，有可能再给她弟弟鲍勃买点零食。我们还需要给小孩们买一条塑料小蛇和一个玩具大青蛙。她可以把这些东西装进3个红色袋子里，我们周三将去火车站接她。”

In nineteen ninety-nine, Professor Weinberger put the recordings online. The Speech Accent Archive is for anyone who wants to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.
1999年，Weinberger教授把这些录音放到了互联网。这份语言口音档案提供给任何想对不同英语朗读者的口音做比较和分析的人士使用。

For example, here is a thirty-two-year-old Iraqi man:
例如，这是一位32岁伊拉克男子的朗读：

IRAQI MAN: "Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store."
伊拉克男子：“请致电斯特拉，让她从商店购买这些东西。”

And here is a twenty-three-year-old woman from Eritrea:
这里是一位23岁的厄立特里亚女子的朗读：

ERITREAN WOMAN: "Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob."
厄立特里亚女子：“六匙新鲜荷兰豆，五大块蓝纹奶酪，有可能再给她弟弟鲍勃买点小吃。”

Some people think the archive would be better if it included natural speech -- people talking freely, (not just reading the same words. )Professor Weinberger recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of his site.
有人认为如果这份档案包括人们自由交谈的录音，而不仅仅是朗读同一篇短文就更好了。STEVEN WEINBERGER教授知道他的网站的长处和弱点。

STEVEN WEINBERGER: "The biggest plus, of course, is that it is so uniform that you can immediately compare a Kiswahili speaker to a native English speaker. But the downside is that a less-than-skilled reader will have difficulties with the paragraph that might not demonstrate their true phonetic abilities."
STEVEN WEINBERGER：“最大的长处当然是这份档案相当统一，你可以立即对斯瓦希里语的朗读者和英语母语的朗读者进行比较。但其缺点是，缺乏训练的人对朗读这篇短文可能存在困难，可能无法表现出他们真正的语言实力。”

People often use sounds from their first language until they can reproduce the ones used in the language they are learning.
人们通常使用其母语的发音，直到他们能复制正在学习的这门语言的正确发音。

Professor Weinberger says the site gets a million visits a month.
STEVEN WEINBERGER教授表示，这个网站每月访客高达100万人次。

STEVEN WEINBERGER: "We get notices from speech pathologists, from computational engineers who do speech processing, from PhD students who want to do research on bias and accent judgments, from actors who need to learn a special part."
STEVEN WEINBERGER：“我们得到了来自语言病理学家，语音处理计算工程师，研究偏好和口音鉴定的博士生，以及需要学习特定地方口音的演员们的关注。”

The archive contains more than one thousand five hundred recordings. These can be searched many ways, including by place of birth and the age at which the speaker began to learn English.
这份档案包括1500多份录音，它们可以通过多种途径搜索，包括使用出生地和朗读者开始学习英语的年龄搜索。

Professor Weinberger would like more people to send in their own samples of the sixty-nine-word paragraph.
STEVEN WEINBERGER教授希望更多人给他发送自己朗读的这段69个单词的短文的录音样本。

STEVEN WEINBERGER: "Right now we only have samples from about three hundred fifty languages, including English. You know, there are six thousand languages in the world today, so we need lots more. That's why the archive work will never be finished."
STEVEN WEINBERGER：“当前我们只有来自以350种不同语言为母语的朗读者的录音样本，其中包括英语。而你知道当今世界上有6000种语言。因此我们需要更多录音样本，这就是为什么这项档案工作永远无法完成的原因。”