Bengali 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 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. 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 on the Bengali language

Bengali, also known as Bangla, is a member of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It originally evolved from dialects such as Magadhi Prakit and Pali, which developed from dialects close to classical Sanskrit.

The language is spoken throughout the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which is made up of Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam.

There are two forms of Bengali – the colloquial Chaltibhasa and the more formal Sadhubhasa. Sadhubhasa, influenced by the rich tradition of early Bengali poetry, became standardised in the 19th century as the literary form of Bengali.

There are four main dialects of the language. These are Radha (West Bengal), Pundra or Varendra (northern parts of West Bengal and Bangladesh), Kamrupa (northeastern Bangladesh) and Bangla (the rest of Bangladesh).

Which countries have Bengali as a national language?

Bengali is the national language of Bangladesh. It is one of 23 official languages recognised by the Republic of India, and the official language of the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura. It is the co-official language of the Indian state of Assam, and the second official language of the Indian state of Jharkhand. It is also recognised as a secondary language in the city of Karachi in Pakistan.

How many people speak Bengali as their first language?

It is estimated that there are around 230 million native Bengali speakers in the world, the majority of whom live in Bangladesh. Approximately 98% of Bangladeshis speak Bengali as their first language.

It is the second most spoken language in India (after Hindi), and the sixth most spoken language in the world.

As well as being spoken throughout the region of Bengal, it is also prevalent on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. There are large populations of Bengali speakers in the Middle East, United States, Japan, Australia, Canada, Pakistan and the UK.

Did you know…

• The language is symbolic of Bengali nationalism. On 21 February 1952 several people were killed in former East Bengal (now Bangladesh), protesting for its use as a state language. The date is now remembered annually in Bangladesh as Language Movement Day.
• Bangladesh means ‘Bengali homeland’ – coined by the people of eastern Bengal when they won sovereign independence for their nation in 1971. Their native ethnic term for themselves is Bangli – Bengali is an anglicisation.
• There is a long literary tradition associated with Bengali – a source of much national pride. The first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize for literature was the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, in 1913.

The Bangladeshi economy

Bangladesh has a developing market-based economy, which held fast through the global financial crisis and continues to grow despite political instability and weak infrastructure.

Over half of the country’s GDP is generated by the service sector, and nearly half of Bangladeshis work in agriculture. Unemployment is low, at 5%, but it is estimated that as many as 40% are under-employed (and underpaid).

Bangladesh is one of the Next Eleven (N-11) economies identified by Goldman Sachs as having good investment opportunities, with a large consumer market, single-digit inflation rate and growing middle class.