This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

這里是美國之音慢速英語教育報道。

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.

史蒂文·溫伯格（Steven Weinberger）是喬治梅森大學英語系語言學主任，該

校位于弗吉尼亞州費爾法克斯縣。溫伯格教授表示，語言學入門班級中的的學生

大多數有意教授非英語母語人士，所以他們想要研究非母語人士如何發音。

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."

溫伯格：“于是我們派學生給非母語人士錄音并相互比較，同時還和英語母語人

士比較。”

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:

溫伯格教授寫了一段短文讓所有人朗讀。這段短文使用一些常用詞，但卻包含了

英語使用的幾乎所有的發音。以下是由我同事Bob Doughty朗讀的這段69個單詞

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：“請致電斯特拉，讓她從商店購買這些東西：六匙新鮮荷蘭豆，

五大塊藍紋奶酪，有可能再給她弟弟鮑勃買點小吃。我們還需要給小孩們買一條

塑料小蛇和一個玩具大青蛙。她可以把這些東西裝進3個紅色袋子里，我們周三

將去火車站接她。”

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，溫伯格教授把這些錄音放到了網上。這份語言口音檔案提供給任何想對

不同英語朗讀者的口音做比較和分析的人士使用。

For example, here is a thirty-two-year-old Iraqi man:

例如，這是一位32歲伊拉克男子：

IRAQI MAN: "Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her

from the store."

伊拉克男子：“請致電斯特拉，讓她從商店購買這些東西。”

And here is a twenty-three-year-old woman from Eritrea:

而這是一位23歲的厄立特里亞女子：

ERITREAN WOMAN: "Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of

blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob."

厄立特里亞女子：“六匙新鮮荷蘭豆，五大塊藍紋奶酪，有可能再給她弟弟鮑勃

買點小吃。”

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.

有人認為如果這份檔案包括人們自由交談的錄音，而不僅僅是朗讀同一篇短文就

更好了。溫伯格教授知道他的網站的長處和弱點。

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."

溫伯格：“最大的長處當然是這份檔案如此統一，你可以立即對斯瓦希里語朗讀

者和英語母語朗讀者做比較。但其短處是，缺乏訓練的人對朗讀這篇短文可能存

在困難，可能無法表現出他們真正的語言實力。”

People often use sounds from their first language until they can

reproduce the ones used in the language they are learning.

人們通常使用其母語的發音，直到他們能模仿正在學習的這門語言的正確發音。

Professor Weinberger says the site gets a million visits a month.

溫伯格教授表示，這個網站每月訪客高達1百萬人次。

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."

溫伯格：“我們得到了來自語言病理學家，語音處理工程師，研究偏好和口音鑒

定的博士生，以及需要學習特定地方口音的演員們的建議。”

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.

這份檔案包括1500多份錄音，它們可以通過多種途徑搜索，包括使用出生地和朗

讀者開始學習英語的年齡搜索。

Professor Weinberger would like more people to send in their own

samples of the sixty-nine-word paragraph.

溫伯格教授希望更多人給他發送自己朗讀的這段69個單詞的短文的錄音樣本。

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."

溫伯格：“當前我們只有來自以350種不同語言為母語的朗讀者的錄音樣本，其

中包括英語。而你知道當今世界上有6000種語言。因此我們需要更多錄音樣本，

這就是為什么這項檔案工作永遠無法結束的原因。”

And that's the VOA Special English Education Report. You can find a

link to the Speech Accent Archive at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm

Christopher Cruise.