How do you pronounce "Justin Trudeau"?

Sometimes the simple way of pronouncing a word can be crucial. This is a subject that, until recently, was of little concern to the written press. However, it turns out that, since 2022, readers of Le Monde can become listeners at will, thanks to the Text-to-Speech system , which allows them to listen to the articles of their choice in their bathroom, on the subway, on their bike, while driving, or during their morning jog. First deployed on the content of the La Matinale du Monde application, the audio feature was so successful that it has gradually been extended to most of the daily's articles.

The newspaper's Proofreading department is now required to correct, in addition to spelling, typographical, and grammatical errors, pronunciation errors. Artificial intelligence is regularly trapped by the absurd spellings of French ("les poules du couvent couvent", "nous éditions de belles éditions", "ce homme est fier, peut-on s'en confiance?"). It sometimes reads "pluss" instead of "plü" ("I want more!"), or "ultraviol" instead of "ultraviolent" ("un film ultraviolent"), and even "quatre-vingts-h'ans" instead of "quatre-vingts-z'ans".

Yet, most of the incongruities concern, unsurprisingly, the reading of proper names, whether they are of places, people, or brands. Indeed, their pronunciation often only very loosely follows the rules of reading French... even more so when it comes to names that are not French. "Afrikaner" was thus quite logically read "afrikané," the "de Broglie affair" was not pronounced "de Breuille," and "social network X" still frequently becomes "social network ten." Corrections are made "by hand" and on the fly, often following the reporting of one or more listeners, the latter being encouraged to point out errors in audio transcription after listening to each article.

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