In the Calculating Stars, one of the characters is a Taiwanese woman*. I’ve described her as having a light Taiwanese accent and, being the 1950s, imagine that it would be British inflected. I am looking for a woman who is a native speaker to record some lines of dialogue for me that I can try to match for the audiobook.
While I have accent tapes to help, these are producing a generic accent.
I am happy to pay for the time required to record these. I don’t need clean recordings because these won’t air. They are purely for my use in locking down this voice for narration. I estimate it will take fifteen minutes to record them and I’m offering $40 for the recording.
In an ideal world, I’m looking for:
- Taiwanese woman**
with British inflected English - Soprano (because I tend to match tone when I’m mimicking)
- Actor
Here are some sample lines. There are 8 pages like this. You would only be recording the lines in bold.
Helen read the numbers from my page, her faint Taiwanese accent coming out with her excitement. “Velocity: 2,350 meters per second. Angle of elevation: four minutes of arc. Altitude: 101.98 kilometers.” Her voice was shockingly high amid the tenors and baritones of Mission Control.
–
Helen wiped her eyes and looked over my shoulder. “Hello, Dr. York.”
–“Slide rules.” Helen folded her hands demurely in her lap. “And their uses.”
–“Speak for yourself.” Helen ran her hands down her flight suit, which accentuated her boyish figure.
–“How?” Helen leaned forward in her seat
–
Helen raised her hand, as if to remind us that she was from Taiwan. “He’ll counter with international cooperation.”
I nodded. “We’ve got people at the IAC from Taiwan, Algeria, Spain, Brazil, France, Germany, Serbia, Haiti, the Congo . . .”
Helen chimed in, “Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom . . .”
*If this were the main character, I would have turned the book down, even though I wrote it.
**I had mistakenly thought that I needed British inflected English, because I conflated language patterns. This is exactly why I want a native speaker.
I am a Taiwanese woman, but… honestly, my accent is mostly apparent when speaking Mandarin. It is not my experience in English that a Taiwanese accents differs hugely from a Chinese one (but I am notorious for being bad at picking up accents) and some don’t have much of one at all. All this to say that it might be okay to have someone speaking her lines in generic English.
Thanks! My understanding is that it’s a bunch of subtle differences, mostly surrounding “th” substitutions.