Some of her talk is legible e.g. the Tecnam bit at 1:14.
OTOH, at 1:38, the phrase “ready to depart” is completely garbled_, so how can anyone say it is “Completely understandable from ATC’s perspective.” !/system/1/userfiles/files/000/023/895/23895/4c10d4c66/large/92147-37688..!
It sounds like she actually said “ready behind” and not “ready to depart behind” as the subtitle says. The next legible words start with “behind the next landing traffic”.
The audio track is heavily clipped. If you load it into a sound editor, the loud bits are exactly the same height as the rest.
At 1:38 she says “Bonjour, ready behind the next landing traffic?”, and I understand that fine.
Peter wrote:
Probably true, because I can’t make out much of it.However there is a fair bit of noise on the audio, too. It is also heavily distorted. That’s unusual in real life.
I’ve just checked the PC speakers with some music and they are great.
Justine has just listened to it and agrees most of it is illegible. For example the ATCO’s transmission around 3:01 is unreadable.
I can understand all she says perfectly fine, except for what’s distorted.
I just listened without looking at the subtitles and I find the ATC voice by far the clearest of video.
Since this is a live ATC recording (apparently), I imagine the recording comes from some off the airport ground receiver, so , there is a decent chance at least some of the distortions come from there..
I agree the ATC is the clearest – women usually are 
But airline pilots often do garble their transmissions; it seems to be the rite of passage of a “pro” to do that – or at least some think so I have 500-1000hrs in the Eurocontrol IFR system, BTW.
I also agree that it was probably picked up with some crappy radio…
Flyer59 – what does the subtitle for 1:38 say?
Peter wrote:
The audio track is heavily clipped.
There must be something wrong with your setup. I’ve just downloaded the track with youtube-dl, converted it to wav (pcm16le) using ffmpeg, then loaded it into audacity. If I zoom in, the different transmissions are far from the same amplitude, and the peak amplitude in the recording is 5.41dB below clipping level.
Accusing the controller of “terrible pronunciation” because the recording someone else made is alledgedly clipped? 
I have uploaded my extracted mp3 audio here
and any pilot will know what that means. What else can it mean than “to depart”?
This is a part of the problem. If the question needs to be asked…
The ATC transmission is heavily accented from anything I would call “English”. Whether someone else can work it out is a personal thing, of course. I can’t make out a lot of it. I can make out most of it if I play it back over and over 10 times but in real life one doesn’t have that opportunity.
The ATC transmission is heavily accented from anything I would call “English”.
Sorry, Peter, but that is really completely exaggerated. I think she speaks english fine, and it is always clear what she means. She does not even have a bad accent. She doesn’t pronounce EVERY word perfectly, but that’s maybe asking a little too much …
This is a part of the problem. If the question needs to be asked…
Nobody is asking that question, except you ;-)
172driver wrote:
In a former life I worked as interpreter and translator and am therefore used to do this, but believe me, after a day of interpreting you are worn out
If you don’t do it professionally it’s even worse. A couple of years ago I was at a talk in Spain, and I had a couple of friends with me who didn’t speak Spanish. It was the first time I’ve attempted to translate in near real time, and within half an hour I had a headache coming on and was struggling to keep up. (And this was a technical subject which are generally not as difficult to translate).
Nobody is asking that question, except you
I was referring to your Q.
“ready behind next landing traffic” is a f-ing (sorry for swearing but this illustrates the problem really well) meaningless phrase. Ready for what? Ready to move forward? Ready to depart? Ready to line up? A regular will know of course, and the “commercial pilot” who replied did read back the presumed-right thing, but only because he probably does it 3x a day.
Speaking of headaches, taxiing out of Athens in September almost did my head in, too.
