Finnish 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 Finnish language

Finnish, also known as Suomi, is a member of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. It is most closely related to Estonian, Hungarian, Sámi (spoken by the indigenous people of northern Finland, Sweden, Norway and northwest Russia) and various other languages spoken around the Baltic Sea.

It is believed that the Finnish people and their language originally came from the Ural Mountains in western Russia, from where they migrated to present-day Finland.

In the 12th and 13th centuries Sweden colonised Finland and made it into a Swedish province. Although Finland remained fairly autonomous, Swedish was used in Finnish government, literature and education right up until the 19th century. The country separated from Sweden in 1809, and Finnish gradually gained dominance, becoming the official language of Finland in 1863.

Today there are several Finnish dialects, which are divided into two groups – the Western dialects and the Eastern dialects. They differ in very minor ways and are almost entirely mutually intelligible.

Which countries have Finnish as a national language for voice-over?

Finnish is one of two official languages of Finland, along with Swedish, and is also recognised as an official minority language in Sweden. It is an official language of the European Union.

How many people speak Finnish as their first language?

Approximately five million people speak Finnish as their first language, most of whom live in Finland (where around 90% of the population are native Finnish speakers).

Other first languages spoken in Finland include Swedish (around 5% of the population) and Sami. There are sizeable Finnish-speaking communities in Sweden, Norway, Russia, Estonia, Brazil, Canada and the United States.

Did you know…

• Although Finnish is not an Indo-European language, Finns are more genetically similar to their Indo-European-speaking neighbours than their Uralic-speaking ones (eg the indigenous Sami). This could be due to the absorption of Indo-European speakers migrating north into the country.
• In 1835 national feeling was given a huge boost by the publication of the Kalevala, an epic poem based on Finnish folklore and written in Finnish by Elias Lönnrot.
• Finnish contains many Germanic loanwords, despite not being an Indo-European language. This suggests that there would have been significant trade between Germanic people and ancient Finns.
• Finnish is written with the Swedish version of the Latin alphabet. This includes the distinct characters Ä and Ö, and several characters (b, c, f, q, w, x, z and å) used for words of non-Finnish origin.

The Finnish economy

Finland has mixed economy, with a similar per capita output to that of Sweden. International trade – 60% of which is within the European Union – accounts for one third of its GDP.

Finland is known for its high-tech electronics manufacturing industry, particularly exports such as mobile phones, but services form the largest sector of the economy (65%).

Finland joined the European Union in 1995, and is the only Nordic country to have joined the eurozone.