Multilingual Voice Over

Today we’d like to touch on a very interesting service (in our biased view) which is called multilingual voice over. It essentially allows you to convert your videos into multilingual videos without the need of re-recording for every market…

There are many applications for these videos, they can be marketing videos explaining how great your business is. They can be user guide videos explaining how to use your product and gain most out of it. They can also be Health & Safety videos for your staff – and considering how Britain continues to attract foreigners, the work force will continue to be multinational, and providing H&S information in your employees’ native language will improve their safety.

As with every project, preparation for multilingual video creation should have an explicit goal set at the start. This will allow for fully understanding your target audience and the way the recordings need to be done. It will also ensure that you will pick the most appropriate languages for your audience, as don’t forget, many languages have different dialects, so it’s crucial to use the most appropriate one.

Once that’s done, and the English version is recorded it is time for translation. The script used for translation should be timed to the video, so translators know how much time is allocated to each sentence/paragraph. Not many people know, but translation from English into other languages often expands in volume. This means that languages such as German and French, for instance, will need about 20% more air time. With that in mind, the English version should allow for additional time; the English artists should speak at a slower rate which would allow the German version to squeeze in without the need to edit the video, which would be quite costly.

Picking the right voice artist is very important too. You want to use a voice that is suitable for the subject matter at hand and for the target audience. We can help with that for you. Whether you need male or female voice, young or older person, we have access to hundreds of artists that we could use and would find the most suitable ones for you. We can even provide you with voice samples, so you can pick the voice you like most.

Whatever market you’re targeting, if you need your videos in several languages, we can help you on that journey…