On the job

DR FIONA SWEE-LIN PRICE IS A PROFESSIONAL NAME READER.

I’ve been in the business of helping people with multicultural names for a long time. My first job was working at Melbourne Uni – I was the cultural diversity person – and I had to develop initiatives to help staff with international students. I asked the uni staff, “What challenges do you face?” and nearly everyone had one thing on their agenda: “How do I pronounce people’s names?” I developed some workshops around that, as well as other topics. Then I struck out on my own as a cultural diversity consultant. I’ve even written a book called Success with Asian Names.

The professional name-reading job came along a couple of years ago. I’d been writing cheat sheets for presenters at uni graduation ceremonies and coaching them on how to pronounce names. For instance, if there was a Chinese grad name, I’d write out the phoneticised English version and work with them to pronounce things correctly. I’d also research different names with native speakers and online. That helped – but not enough, apparently.

One day, Melbourne Uni rang me and said, “Why don’t we cut out the middleman? Why don’t you read them?” We started off with three mid-year graduation ceremonies, and now I’ve read names for RMIT, Monash and Swinburne University, too. I get dressed up in a PHD gown – it’s a standard black academic gown, but I get to wear one of those floppy hats – and I slap on my ‘professional name reader’ badge.

A big majority of the international students in Melbourne are Chinese. I’m half-chinese, but my mum can’t speak Mandarin, so that didn’t help me! I studied the language at university, though. Just before the ceremony, they give me a list of names that are going to be read out. I have a sheet with the intonations of the top 80 Chinese surnames, so at least I get those right. Then I go through the list and circle any other Chinese names, grab a PHD student who’s Chinese, and get them to tell me what the intonations are. I stick that on a little piece of notepaper, then join the academic procession.

Normally, I sit on the stage (or sometimes they put me behind a curtain!) and when it comes to the right moment, I go and start reading. I usually read one name every six to eight seconds, and that can go on for one or two hours. Sometimes I read up to 900 names in one ceremony, and my only break is the five-minute musical interlude.

It’s a bit of a challenge to switch between accents as I go. Sometimes I’ll prep by saying a word in the required language just under my breath. So, I might say ‘sombrero’ to get my vocal cords in the right shape for ‘Jorge Perez Gomez Gonzalez’. Then I go back to ‘Wenqing Xue’, ‘Yukiko Masumoto’, 'Aoife Mcnulty' and ‘Khalid bin Mohammed’. Arabic is quite easy – you need to shuffle to the back of your throat. Mandarin is up the top of the palate towards the nose. French is kind of guttural, while Cantonese is in the jaw.

The language I find most challenging is Vietnamese. All the information you need to pronounce it is not actually visible in what I get written down. There are lots of little tone markings, accents and things on Vietnamese names that get ripped off. Plus, there’s a major regional variation between Northern and Southern Vietnam – but you’d have no idea by looking at their name.

Sometimes when I’m up there I can see students looking at me, like, “Come on, what’s my name?” then I can see them going, “Ahhhh – not bad,” as they walk past. I get some lovely feedback. I’ve had people say, “That’s the first time in four years at this university that someone’s pronounced my name correctly.”