South 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 South African language and accent

South Africa was first inhabited by the Khoisan people in the 15th and 16th centuries. Then Bantu settlers arrived and it is thought that these people are the ancestors of the Nguni people, which include Zulu’s and Swazi’s.

The Dutch had been trading with the South Africans for some time when in 1652 they decided to open a port for their ships to stop mid-route in order for the crew to rest and have a good meal. To this end, farmers were then invited to South Africa to establish farms and grow the food to feed the Dutch sailors.

They also brought in slaves from the far east and the Dutch language began to be spoken amongst the tradesman and the settlers. The slaves however spoke their own languages and created Pidgin languages to enable them to communicate with each other.

During the 18th century, the British took over the South African colony from the Dutch and they brought with them the English language. Africa became a country where the people were bilingual, speaking Dutch and English and eventually a dialect of African-English was created that was spoken by the South African people.

The Dutch language diminished, but another language based on it, was created and this is called Afrikaans. It is very close to the European Dutch language.

Today South Africa has eleven official languages, Afrikaans and English being two of them. IsiZulu is the most widely spoken language in black African homes across South Africa. Zulu was revived after the demise of apartheid in 1994; Along with the official African languages which include Setswana and Sesotho, amongst others.

To hear a South African accent, listen to the cricket commentator. He is speaking English with a South African accent.