What Kind of South African English Voice Over are you looking for?
South African English is a unique sub-variety of English with distinct linguistic features influenced by the country’s diverse cultural and linguistic landscape. Incorporating elements from Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and other local languages, South African English reflects the rich heritage of South Africa. Using a South African English voice-over ensures that your content appeals to a culturally engaged audience, enhancing connection and relevance.
A Brief History of South African English
South African English has its roots in the arrival of British settlers in the early 19th century. Over time, it evolved by absorbing elements from various languages spoken in the region, including Afrikaans, indigenous African languages like Zulu and Xhosa, and later influences from global English varieties. This rich linguistic history has given South African English its unique character, making it a vibrant and dynamic sub-variety of English. This linguistic merge brought about a language that is similar to British English, with nuanced features belonging to other languages originally spoken in the region.
Learn more about South African English Voice Over Services
Application of South African English Voice Over different types of content
Implementing voice overs in South African English can be of great importance to generate a stronger bond with your audience. For this reason, South African voice overs are particularly important in advertising, where resonating with your audience is of utmost importance to acquire new customers, as well as in fiction, where creating a realistic voice over for South African characters can make the difference between success and failure.
Why Hire a Native South African English Voice Actor?
A combined strategy
If you are planning on creating voice overs in English, you may want to include South African English, together with UK, American English, and other regional varieties. This will ensure that your content reaches audiences in anglophone countries all over the world.
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Hiring a native voice over artist ensures that all these nuances are reproduced in a voice over production. This is of utmost importance when providing content to this region, as offering a product that culturally resembles the target audience will ensure that they feel represented and aligned with your content. Creating voice overs in your audience’s specific dialect shows how important they are for you and how you seek to communicate effectively with them, leading to increased credibility, brand awareness and engagement.
Hiring a native South African English voice actor brings several advantages:
Nuanced Pronunciation: Native speakers have a natural grasp of the distinct pronunciation patterns, including specific vowel sounds and intonation unique to South African English. This ensures that your voice-over sounds authentic and relatable to local audiences.
Cultural Understanding: A native voice actor understands the cultural context and can incorporate idiomatic expressions and cultural references specific to South Africa. This enhances the authenticity of the content and ensures it resonates deeply with the audience.
Lexical Knowledge: South African English includes words and phrases borrowed from Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and other local languages. A native speaker is well-versed in these lexical nuances, making the content more reflective of the South African linguistic landscape.
Natural Fluency: Native speakers deliver content with natural fluency and ease, ensuring clear and professional communication. This is essential for maintaining the quality and effectiveness of your message.
How does GoLocalise work?
Understanding your project’s needs
GoLocalise is composed by a team of experienced professionals who work hand in hand with the best translation and production companies to provide you with top-quality services. The first step is to understand the technical aspects of your project to understand what we need to do to guarantee your necessities are met. We will ask a set of questions to determine your target audience, the type of content you want us to work with and the impact you want to achieve.
Selecting the ideal voice-over artists for your project
We want you to find the perfect voice-over artist for your project. For this, we will search for the ideal candidate within or outside our artist portfolio. Whether you are looking for an engaging, expressive, or commercial voice, we’ve got you covered!
Assigning a multilingual project manager
We will assign an exclusive project manager to serve as your only point of contact to guide you along the process, answer all questions you may have and make every stage easier. This project manager will:
- Explain all the steps involved in the process to make it easy to understand and help you determine what exactly are the services you need to ensure you stay within your budget.
- Help in selecting the ideal voice-over artist to transmit your ideas.
- Guarantee all the steps in the process are well-organized and that all deadlines are met. After choosing your ideal artist, you can relax and let your experienced project manager take care of the rest until the process is finished.
Record voice-over audio in our modern studios
All details in the process have been carefully designed to enable you to focus on the core of the service: the voice-over recording session. Your recordings will sound beautifully neat thanks to our audio equipment and our top-quality acoustic studios, using Pro Tools HD and Neumann microphones. Our sound engineers will then adjust the recorded audio to make it sharp and clean, ensuring you don’t need to repeat any recording, and thus, make the most out of your budget. In the case of those languages neither you nor your client speaks, we offer professional linguistic help to make sure everything is clear in all languages you are translating your content into.
Finding professional voice actors for your projects
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What our happy customers say
Thomas Kennedy
Designer at Atlas Knowledge
Kerry Gillies
Director at Synergy Language Services
Philippa Strandberg-Long
Deputy Course Leader - Acting, Italia Conti
Jonathan Lapps
Account Manager at Epipheo
Lucas Cole
Sales and Marketing Director at Epipheo
Adam Ruddick
Head of Production at Casual Films
FAQs
The main features that characterise South African English are phonological, i.e., related to pronunciation. Although they have some slight differences in grammar, South African English-speakers stand out for their particular pronunciation, which is a mix of British English modified by other languages spoken in the region. Understanding and being able to replicate these differences is essential when creating a well-localised voice over.
