Some websites are great, but I've found they're wrong often enough I usually want to corroborate them with something else.
A specific pronunciation I sometimes want and haven't been able to find in the past is Ali Maow Maalin, for reading 500 Million, But Not A Single One More.
(The other awkward names in that according to me are Viktor Zhdanov and Karel Raška, and I don't remember their pronunciations offhand but it looks like some combination of google and Wikipedia will help.)
I would use the following strategy: find how the name is written in the original language, then copy it into Google Translate (with the correct language set) and click to hear the pronounciation.
For example, the Wikipedia English page for Viktor Zhdanov links to Russian (Русский) page for... well, the page title is Жданов, Виктор Михайлович (вирусолог), because there were multiple famous people with the same name (including the patronymic)... but anyway, just copy everything into Google Translate, which also deciphers the Cyrillic, so you can now rearrange it to Виктор Жданов.
With Karel Raška, you already have the correct written form, just set the language in Google Translate to Czech.
This is a great strategy, Viliam, thank you! Stumbled upon it while trying to pronounce Ali Maow Maalin.
As part of my work I have to pronounce a lot of names and other uncommon/specialized words. More often than not this turns out to be hard.
This is quite time-consuming because of things like:
I'm going to maintain and regularly add to a list here of pronunciations for key names and concepts relevant to LW and its extended ecosystem. Hopefully this will be a useful resource for anyone creating audio content, giving talks, interviews etc. Maybe check here first before wading into Google.
Feel free to comment with corrections and suggested additions.\
Test footnote