Setting up a Russian voice
- Record 5 to 15 seconds of a native Russian speaker.
- Set the voice's Language to Russian.
- Test with words that have ё and words whose meaning depends on stress.
Write ё
Russian is often printed with е in place of ё, and readers fill it in from context. Write it in scripts: it tells the voice exactly how to read the word, and sometimes which word it is: все / всё (all / everything), небо / нёбо (sky / palate), осел / осёл (settled / donkey).
Mark ambiguous stress
Russian stress isn't written and can fall on any syllable, and some words change meaning with it:
| Stress here | Or here | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| за́мок | замо́к | castle / lock |
| му́ка | мука́ | torment / flour |
| пла́чу | плачу́ | I cry / I pay |
| ду́хи | духи́ | spirits / perfume |
Chatterbox, the model abcVoiceover uses, is built to read Russian with stress marks, so adding an acute accent over the stressed vowel of a word that comes out wrong is the most direct fix. Most keyboards can type it as a combining accent (U+0301) straight after the vowel. Mark only the words that need it, not every word.
Writing Russian for the voice
- Numbers in the right case: с 5 друзьями → с пятью друзьями; 1 мая → первого мая.
- Abbreviations: т. е. → то есть, и т. д. → и так далее, г. → год or город, руб. → рублей.
- Latin-script names and brands are best transliterated the way they're said in Russian.
A passage to record
Я уже несколько недель собирался это записать, так что начнём. Тихий вечер, кофе готов, и у меня наконец есть пара
минут для себя. Посмотрим, как это звучит.
"I'd been meaning to record this for weeks, so let's begin. A quiet evening, the coffee's ready, and I finally have a couple of minutes to myself. Let's see how it sounds."
A dialogue to test with
Аня: Ты уже пришёл? Я жду с восьми.
Миша: Прости! Пробки были ужасные.
Аня: Ладно, главное, ты здесь. Закажем?Long-form Russian
Russian audiobooks and narrated courses benefit most from careful stress marking, because a long text has many more chances for an ambiguous word. Keep a list of the marked words for the project. See audiobooks and fixing mispronunciations.