Haitian-Creole 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 Haitian-Creole language

Haitian Creole is a French-based creole language that developed in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the late 17th century, as a result of communication between French settlers and African slaves.

A creole language is a natural language formed by the mixing together of two or more parent languages. Haitian Creole is the most widely spoken of all the French creole languages.

There are lots of theories about how exactly Haitian Creole evolved, but many believe that it developed as a means of contact between French masters and African slaves working on Haiti’s sugarcane plantations in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The French settlers spoke Popular (or common) French, a dialect that was quite different to the Standard French spoken in France by the ruling classes. The African slaves spoke many different languages (such as Wolof, Fong, Mandingo and Ewe) and began to use (and adapt) Popular French to communicate with each other as well as with their masters. As this language became creolised, newcomers began to learn (and adapt) this version rather than Popular French. Thus Haitian Creole evolved and came to be the language spoken by all Haitians.

Which countries have Haitian Creole as a national language?

Creole is one of two official languages in Haiti, along with French. It is also recognised as a minority language in the Dominican Republic and Cuba.

How many people speak Haitian Creole as their first language?

It is estimated that around 10 million people speak Creole as their first language, most of whom live in Haiti. There are significant Creole-speaking communities in the Dominican Republic, as well as the United States.

It is the first and only language of approximately 90% of the population of Haiti. Around 10% of Haitians speak French as well as Haitian Creole.

Did you know…

• The term ‘creole’ comes from a Portuguese word that means ‘raised in the home’. It was first used to describe Europeans who were born into overseas colonies, before coming to refer to the languages that evolved on the plantations in those colonies.
• Haitian Creole shows more influence from African languages than any of the other French creoles. It has been suggested that this is partly because of the high ratio of Africans to Europeans in Haiti, and partly because Haiti gained independence so early on (in 1804).
• Despite the fact that over 90% of Haitian Creole’s vocabulary is of French origin, French people cannot understand the language. This is partly because the grammar is so different from French, and partly because many words in Popular French have been changed in Standard French.

The Haitian economy

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with 80% of the population living below the poverty line. Issues affecting the economy include corruption, lack of access to education, and vulnerability to natural disasters.

Agriculture accounts for the largest segment of the economy, with two fifths of the population engaged in mainly small-scale subsistence farming. This sector suffered major setbacks from 2010’s earthquake and 2012’s hurricanes.