Transcreation and Voice-Over for Space City

Project description

To deliver voice-over, translation and transcreation in 18 languages for a 30-second global commercial.

Deliverables

• Time-synced voice-over (German, French Canadian, Spanish, Italian, Swiss Italian, Croatian, Turkish, French, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Swiss German, Armenian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese and Swiss French).

• Translation, transcreation, audio editing and file delivery.

Client

Space City is an award-winning production and TV advertising agency that has worked with exciting brands such as Qatar Airways, Palmer’s and Virgin Group.

In this collaboration, they required a Qatar Airways x UEFA Champions League star-studded TV commercial to be translated and transcreated (culturally adapted for local audiences) to promote the partnership between football and travel.

This case study explores how Matinée Multilingual delivered the translation, transcreation and voice-over in 18 languages, including linguistically challenging ones such as Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Croatian and Belarusian.

Brief

How do you transcreate the famous catchphrase “Here you go” by Italian sports journalist Fabrizio Romano without losing its original intent?

Looking to breathe new life into the commercial, which also featured Brazilian football legend Ricardo Kaká and former Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand, Space City needed a multilingual localisation partner who could connect with football fans worldwide.

With this creative direction in mind, Space City required a team of qualified and vetted linguists who could transcreate the script and later cast 18 male voice artists in the required languages to record a time-synced voice-over that matched the tone, mood and lip movements of the original English commercial.

Solution

For this multi-faceted campaign, our talent manager hit the ground running by shortlisting a team of professional linguists for the transcreation process.

Once the approved linguists delivered several versions of the script, the client reviewed them and gave the green light to cast suitable voice artists for the commercial.

We then handpicked a selection of male voice artists in the required languages, each with distinct vocal traits such as bold, energetic and authoritative.

Upon the client’s approval of the chosen voices, our project manager liaised and coordinated the time-synced voice-over recordings across all 18 voice artists.

Each voice artist was advised to provide several takes of the script to ensure that they could culturally match the mood of the three simple words and the rest of the script that were originally in English.

The audio files were then edited by our in-house audio engineers and delivered to the client.

As the project had multiple elements, the client received all deliverables in a staggered manner, ahead of the deadline, to ensure they could continue production on their end without delay.

All in all, it was a complex yet highly successful project. We kept the client fully informed and supported throughout, all while maintaining the highest quality standards at every stage of the project.