Dari 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 Dari language

Dari (also called Farsi or Parsi, sometimes known as Afghan Persian) belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Technically the term Dari is used to classify the modern dialect of Persian that is spoken in Afghanistan.

The historical development of Persian is generally grouped into three phases:

• Old Persian – up until 3rd century BC – an ancient form of the language that evolved from Proto-Iranian.
• Middle Persian – from the 3rd to 9th century – influenced by other Central Asian languages such as Sogdian, Chrosmian and Parthian. Middle Persian declined after the Arabic conquest in the 7th century.
• New Persian – from the 9th century onwards – adopting simplified grammar, an Arabic script, Arabic vocabulary (and later English, French and German vocabulary).

Which countries have Dari as a national language?

Dari is one of two official languages of Afghanistan – the other is Pashto. Other languages spoken in the country include Uzbek and Turkmen, which are spoken by minorities in northern areas. These are Altaic, rather than Indo-Iranian, languages.

How many people speak Dari as their first language?

In Afghanistan it is estimated that Dari is spoken as a first language by approximately half the population – around 15 million – and understood by 90% of the population. It is the country’s lingua franca, and the principal language of communication and education.

Did you know…

• There are two theories about where the word Dari came from. One is that it came from the word ‘Darbar’, which means court – a reference to the fact that Dari was a respected language used at royal courts of kings. The other theory is that it came from the word ‘Dara’, which means valley – a reference to the birthplace of the language in the mountainous land of Khorasan.
• Although both the Indo-Iranian and Altaic languages of Afghanistan use a modified Arabic alphabet, none is actually related to Arabic, which is a member of the Semitic family of languages.

The Afghanistan economy

Years of conflict have taken their toll on Afghanistan, and although the economy has grown since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, around 35% of the population is unemployed and 36% live below the national poverty line.

The country suffers from lack of infrastructure, criminality, weak governance and high dependence on foreign aid.

There is some hope for the future, however; the government claims that the country could be one of the richest mining regions in the world, with up to $3 trillion in proven untapped mineral deposits.