MarchingOrder’s pre-recorded name solutions provide ceremony organizers with peace of mind that their graduates’ names will be announced clearly and accurately on graduation day.
“We’re focused on getting these names right because it’s the most important day for these students—one of the most important days of their lives, and for their families,” explains Miranda Smith, MarchingOrder’s Quality Assurance Project Lead.
From collecting proper name pronunciations, through recording and testing, each graduate name goes through a stringent process to ensure that it’s pronounced clearly and accurately on graduation day.
Collecting Proper Name Pronunciations
When graduates register for their graduation ceremony through MarchingOrder’s platform, they access our pronunciation manager tool, Say It Right, which displays the suggested pronunciation and phonetics of their name, generated from MarchingOrder’s continually-growing 50,000+ database of names from around the world.
If the suggested pronunciations are not a match, graduates can record their proper name pronunciation and enter the correct written phonetics. This information can then be used to ensure accurate name announcements by live school readers or MarchingOrder’s professional voiceover artists.
Professional Name Recording
MarchingOrder uses professional voiceover artists to record graduate names and ceremony announcements.
“The readers that we’re using are all voiceover professionals, so they have a proper studio to record in, whether that’s at home or going to a professional studio. They’re recorded in a controlled environment. They’re professional readers and most of them have been working with us for a long time, some more than 10 years,” explained James Morgan, MarchingOrder’s Director of Product Management.
Quality Assurance Testing
A team of quality assurance testers checks each ProNounce recording against the graduate information for clarity and accuracy. During peak ceremony season, MarchingOrder employs a team of up to thirty checkers to test the quality of the name recordings.
Smith looks for specific qualities in each name checker. “It’s good to have a facility with languages or at least an idea of how it’s supposed to sound. We look for a specific type of person to be able to check—a type of person who’s a little worldly, somebody who is, if not fluent in some other language, at least conversant to understand the phonetic sounds of the names.”
In the first level of testing, each recording is checked twice – once by each of two testers. The checkers flag any names that were pronounced incorrectly or contained any errors or background noises.
“We check to make sure that there are not any noises, glitches or hissing on the final recording and that the name pronunciations are correct,” said Smith.
After the two checkers have finished testing each name, flagged recordings are reviewed by Smith and re-recorded as needed.
“Basically, we have three people checking each flagged name, and once I go over the mistakes and double check those—‘yes, these are actual mistakes,’—I send them all back to the reader. The reader re-records all the flagged names, those recordings come back to me and I check them through as many times as we need to get it right,” said Smith.
Peace of Mind
MarchingOrder’s professional name recording solutions give our clients peace of mind that their graduates’ names are recorded professionally and accurately—eliminating the worry of mispronouncing a graduate’s name at one of the most important moments of their lives.
“What you have here is a comprehensive way to get rid of that worry. It’s all done for you by people who have done this repeatedly, every year—not once a year or twice a year, but several hundred times a year,” says Smith.
Join us for a demonstration and see how our solutions can deliver professional and accurate name recordings for your next ceremony. See A Demo
Related Articles
What’s In A Name?
How MarchingOrder’s solutions can speed up your graduation ceremony
Case Study: How NYU Tandon Used MarchingOrder’s Live Ceremony Tools for Their Ceremony at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center