diff --git a/NEWS.rst b/NEWS.rst
index 00a52a3a9..df36633bf 100644
--- a/NEWS.rst
+++ b/NEWS.rst
@@ -1,3 +1,7 @@
+- [_n_a_m_e] Fixed error in ``addMultilingualName`` with one-character names.
+  Only attempt to recovered malformed UTF-16 data from a ``bytes`` string,
+  not from unicode ``str`` (#1997, #1998).
+
 4.12.0 (released 2020-06-09)
 ----------------------------