Afrikaans Voice Over Agency

Working with translation and production companies

Adding audio visual services to your mix will create many new sales opportunities for your team.

Matinée has over thirty 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. 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.

If you are a translation company, we will send you some helpful guidelines when providing us with copy or scripts, and we can either work from your translations or handle the whole project for you, including translation. If you are a production company, we will provide translations or subtitles in your preferred format; whether that’s subtitle-ready files (XML or PNG), or burnt in as fully-subtitled videos. Voiceover recordings can be supplied as edited files, or we can remix with the original music and effects and provide a finished video, 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.

A short history of the Afrikaans language

Afrikaans is a North Germanic language, spoken mainly in South Africa and Namibia, and descended from Dutch.

During the 18th century, Afrikaans evolved from various dialects spoken by the Dutch settlers of what is now South Africa. Although approximately 90-95% of the vocabulary is of Dutch origin, words were also adopted from Malay, Portuguese, and various Bantu and Khoisan languages.

In the early 20th century, Afrikaans was recognised legally as a distinct language – not just a Dutch dialect – and it went on to replace Standard Dutch as an official language of South Africa when it became a republic in 1961.

Today, although Afrikaans is spoken as a first language by only around 13.5% of the population of South Africa, most South Africans understand it as a second (or third) language.

In Namibia it is spoken widely as a second language, and by around 11% of the population as a native language. Here it also plays an important role as a lingua franca (or common language).

Which countries have Afrikaans as a national language?

Afrikaans is an official language of South Africa and Namibia. It is also spoken as a native language in other African countries, notably Botswana, Zimbabwe and Malawi, although it is not an official language in these countries. Outside Africa, most Afrikaans-speaking people are emigrants and their descendants.

How many people speak Afrikaans as their first language?

It is estimated that around 10 million people around the world speak Afrikaans as their first language. The total number of people speaking Afrikaans – as a first or second language – could be up to 23 million.

Did you know…

South Africa has eleven official languages. They are – in alphabetical order – Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu. Afrikaans is the third most spoken native language in the country, after Zulu and Zhosa.
Today Afrikaans and Dutch speakers share over 90% of their vocabulary, which means that they can pick up each other’s languages – and the different pronunciations – fairly quickly. Many Dutch (and Belgian) companies take advantage of this, outsourcing their call centres to South Africa.
South African English is peppered with Afrikaans words, such as braai (barbecue) and bakkie (pick-up truck). There are a number of words in standard English that are also derived from Afrikaans, including aardvark, meerkat, trek and apartheid.

The South African economy

Ranked by the World Bank as an ‘upper middle-income country’, South Africa is the largest economy in Africa. Its shrewd financial policies protected the country from the worst effects of the global financial crisis of 2007/2008.

However, at the end of 2013 South Africa is trailing other emerging markets, with unemployment officially at 25% (but estimated to be much higher). The ruling African National Congress says the country has been affected by the economic situation in Europe, with which it has crucial trade links.
But the South African economy has also been badly hit by a series of strikes in key industries, including mining and manufacturing, which together contribute around 22% of the country’s GDP (based on 2012 statistics).