Taterskin Now Available in IPA

Not the beer style, the universal phonetic notation system

I just translated, or converted, my cli-fi book “Taterskin & The Eco Defenders” into IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).

Prior to this, I thought phonetics was written like: “I thot fOnetix wuz riten lIk” or something — where long vowels would be capitalized and silent letters, such as the “ugh” in “thought” were eliminated (ugh! Why is it spelled that way?).

Not so! Using tophonetics.com, you can see that “I thought phonetics was written like” is, in IPA, “aɪ θɔt fəˈnɛtɪks wʌz ˈrɪtən laɪk.”

That website actually calls this morphing of text from English to IPA a “transcription” rather than a translation or even a conversion. That makes sense, as IPA is not a different language, just a different way of displaying a language. A person who knows how to read IPA could read my book, transcribed into IPA, correctly (pronunciation-wise) without necessarily knowing English. They may be uttering jibberish to their own ears, but English speakers listening to them read it would understand it. The same is true of other languages transcribed into IPA (their website indicates French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, and I think possibly Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese as other written languages rife for transcription).

As for English, you choose between American and British English (there are, after all, marked pronunciation differences that suddenly arise somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean).

So IPA is a “universal” notation, not a language in itself.

An advantage of IPA over an actual translation of a work into a different language, such as German or Spanish, is that nothing in the original text is changed — it’s just presented differently. Words are not changed, nor is sentence structure altered. Thus, nothing is “lost in the translation.” Your words are simply converted transcribed into a pronunciation notation system.

Again, someone who knows how to read IPA can read aloud an English text without necessarily knowing English. Others may understand what they are reading, but the reader may not understand it themselves. A British IPA expert could vocalize an “Americanized” English text, and vice versa. This might be an easy way to learn the accent of our cousins across the ocean.

So … I wrote that to write this (context over, on to the nitty-gritty): I spent a good part of yesterday transcribing (via tophonetics.com) Taterskin & The Eco Defenders into IPA, with the intent of publishing this “new edition” on the kindle platform (which allows you to create, not just kindle output, but also paperback and hardback versions of your book).

As for the interior, all went fine (after converting my document into a pdf and uploading it). The cover was a different story, though: Although the Kindle “Cover Creator” initially showed the correct IPA title (below left), when it was actually generated, certain IPA symbols were not represented (below right).

For that reason, I got the following email from amazon/kindle:

And so, as amazon/Kindle makes no cover font available that includes all of the IPA symbols, I have hit a roadblock. For that reason, I am making the IPA version of Taterskin & The Eco Defenders (“Taterskin & ði ˈikoʊ dɪˈfɛndərz”) available for free (pdf download) from here. The original, in standard (American) English, is available there, too (as well as its cover image, and other writings of mine).

By the way, as you may have gathered from the images, Taterskin is not some Russian dude (Ta-TERS-k'n); he’s a Labrador Retriever named for his skin (fur) looking like a “tater” (a Yukon Gold potato to be specific). 

You may have also noticed that, English pronunciation being what it is (inconsistent), tophonetics.com leaves words it doesn’t recognize “as is” (untranscribed) — for how would the transcribing robot know, for instance, that Taterskin was to be pronounced TA-ter-skin and not Ta-TER-sk'n?

---

I have a questIon for readers of this post, as it has more views than most of my substack articles: Do you think there would be a market for combined English/IPA editions of “Taterskin & The Eco Defenders”?

I would name them as follows:

Book 1 Title: Wonders Never Cease
Subtitle: Book 1 of “Taterskin & The Eco Defenders” in English and IPA

Book 2 Title: Tell It to Future Generations
Subtitle: Book 2 of “Taterskin & The Eco Defenders” in English and IPA

Other possibilities are original language + IPA of public domain works, such as Don Quixote, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Scarlet Letter, Frankenstein, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, etc.

---

UPDATE 12/30/2022

I expect to have Book 1, in English on the left pages and IPA on the right pages, available on amazon in just a few days (early January 2023). This can be accomplished by not having any IPA on the cover. It will simply say:

Wonders Never Cease
Book 1 of “Taterskin & The Eco Defenders” in English and IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)

UPDATE 1/1/2023

Wonders Never Cease is now in multiple formats:

Paperback

Hardcover

Kindle

Here are the covers (front and back) of the paperback version:

A sample of the interior is:

UPDATE 5/12/2023

It’s a conundrum that these articles on the IPA/English books are so popular, and yet, to answer my own question about the financial viability of making these books available, only one copy has been sold so far!