African Accent Voice Over Recordings

Working with translation and production companies

Adding audio visual services to your mix will create many new sales opportunities for your team. We can add translation, voice over and subtitling to your company’s offering, which will appear seamless to your clients and yet mesh easily with the processes in your own departments.

Matinée has over 40 years of experience working alongside translation and production companies. So you can be sure our project managers are fully at home with the technical process of supervising and delivering localised material, in a professional and timely manner.

If you are a translation company, we will send you some helpful guidelines for providing us with copy or scripts, as they will need to be formatted correctly for voicing or for subtitling. If you are a production company, we can organise translations and create the subtitles in your preferred format. Voice over recordings can be supplied as edited files, or we can remix with the original music and effects and layback to complete the new video soundtrack, ready to go.

Working seamlessly with your team, we can take on all or part of the process, according to your needs, and help widen your service offering.

Origins of the African language and accent

Most Africans are bilingual and some speak two or three different languages and this is because there are around 2000 African languages, together with the various dialects and accents that go with them. The languages are divided into four groups:

• Afroasiatic – These languages are spoken across North Africa and the Horn of Africa.
• Nilo-Saharan – Includes Tanzania, Nigeria and the Congo.
• Niger-Congo – Includes Bantu languages such as Shona and Zulu
• Khoisan – Can be found in Botswana and Namibia.

However, millions of African people also speak English, either as a first language, or a second or third. English was brought to Africa due to colonisation. Colonists came to Africa in the 1760s and a over a period of nearly 200 years, they ruled over the African People. They used Africa as a trading post and spoke English to the Africans with whom they traded. Britain was also heavily involved in the Slave Trade.

Despite the fact that the continent of Africa now has its independence, English has remained an important language and is still used for official purposes in many African countries. There are around 20 African territories using English as a first language.

African people who speak English have an accent that is influenced by their mother tongue. Pronunciation in English is different between West and East Africa because of the way they pronounce certain letters. Some African regions still hold the English language in high regard, even though they were never colonised by the British. Ethiopia for example has English language newspapers and Western TV shows and radio programmes. You can hear English spoken with an African accent if you watch this episode of the First Ladies No1 Detective Agency on You tube. You can hear the African accent quite distinctly.