Chinese 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, voiceover 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. Voiceover 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 Chinese language and accent

China is one of the oldest civilisations and it was inhabited more than one million years ago. The Chinese language has five dialect groups and these are:

• Mandarin – Mandarin Chinese is the official language of China and Taiwan and also one of the four official languages of Singapore.
• Min – Min is spoken by the people of Taiwan, Fujian province and Hainan. English people regard these languages as dialects and call them Fukkionese, Kokkianese, Amoy and Taiwanese.
• Yue – Yue comes from the province of Guangdong and includes Cantonese which is spoken in Hong Kong.
• Hakka – Hakka can be heard throughout South Eastern China. It means ‘guest’ and Hakka people were originally from the North, but moved South. Hence the name.
• Wu – Wu is spoken around the area of the Yangzi river and a well- known variety of Wu is Shanghainese from Shanghai.

These languages, or dialects have pronunciation and grammar differences and not all of them are mutually intelligible.

The Chinese also have their own phonetic system for transcribing Chinese characters into Latin. It is called Pinyin. This is in order to make it easier for foreigners to understand and for use with computer technology. It was developed in the 1950s and it was adopted as an official standard in 1982 and in Taiwan in 2009. It is also used in primary schools to help children learn standard Chinese pronunciation. Adults are also taught with this system to help improve literacy. Foreigners find it a useful way of learning Chinese pronunciation.

If you want to hear a Chinese accent speaking English, listen to actor Jackie Chan talking about Bruce Lee on You Tube.