Bulgarian 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 Bulgarian language

Bulgarian belongs to the Southern Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is closely related to (and mutually intelligible with) Macedonian, and together the two languages make up the East South Slavic language group.

The development of Bulgarian is usually grouped into three periods:

• Old Bulgarian (9th to 11th century) – also referred to as Old Church Slavonic – during which the Cyrillic alphabet was created and a literary and liturgical form of the southern dialect of Common Slavic was developed (used to translate the Bible into Slavic).
• Middle Bulgarian (12th to 15th century) – during which the language continued to evolve, and was used as the official administration language of the Second Bulgarian Empire. The Turkish conquest of Bulgaria in 1396 slowed development of the language down for several centuries.
• Modern Bulgarian (16th century onwards) – during which a standard written form of the language was established (after Bulgaria gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878). Along the way, Bulgarian had picked up loanwords from Greek, Turkish, Russian, French and German.

Which countries have Bulgarian as a national language?

Bulgarian is the official language of the Republic of Bulgaria. It is also recognised as an official minority language in Serbia, Romania, Ukraine and Moldova.

How many people speak Bulgarian as their first language?

It is estimated that over 10 million people speak Bulgarian as their first language, most of whom live in Bulgaria.

Did you know…

• When Bulgaria acceded to the European Union in 2007, the Cyrillic alphabet became the Union’s third official alphabet, along with the Latin and Greek alphabets.
• There are two main varieties of Bulgarian – the Eastern dialects (known as ‘mek govor’, or ‘soft speech’) and the Western dialects (‘tvurd govor’ – ‘hard speech’). Standard Bulgarian is based on the Eastern dialects.
• Visitors to Bulgaria should at the very least learn the Bulgarian for yes (da) and no (ne) to avoid potential confusion, as Bulgarians shake their heads when they mean ‘yes’ and nod when they mean ‘no’.

The Bulgarian economy

Like other former Soviet satellites, Bulgaria found the transition to democracy and a market economy slow and difficult, although growth has speeded up in recent years.

Key industries include energy, mining, metallurgy, machine building, agriculture and tourism. Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007.