Pashto 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 Pashto language

Pashto (also written as Pukhto, Pakhto or Pushto and historically known as Afghani or Pathani) belongs to the Eastern Iranian sub-group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Its closest relatives are Persian and Kurdish.

Pashto is the native language of the Pashtun people of South-Central Asia. Experts are unsure about the specific origins of the language, but generally agree that the earliest written example dates back to the 16th century (an account of Shekh Mali’s conquest of Swat).

The development of Pashto has been influenced by a number of other languages, including Greek, Saka, Parthian, Persian, Tajik, Uzbek and the Prakrit languages of northwestern India.

Pashto became the national language of Afghanistan in 1936.

Which countries have Pashto as a national language?

Pashto is co-official in Afghanistan, along with Dari, and is recognised as a minority language in Pakistan.

How many people speak Pashto as their first language?

It is estimated that between 40-60 million people speak Pashto as their first language worldwide. Most of these live in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but there are also significant Pashto-speaking communities in Iran, India, Tajikstan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the UK and the United States.

Did you know…

• There are several dialects of Pashto. One way of grouping them distinguishes two main dialects – a ‘softer’ dialect spoken in the south (which can be further divided into southwestern and southeastern varieties) and a ‘harsher’ dialect spoken in the north (further divided into northwestern – sometimes called central – and northeastern varieties).
• Pashto is written using a modified version of the Arabic script, with the Pashto alphabet consisting of 44 letters and four diacritic marks. It has extra letters to represent Pashto sounds. There are two standard written forms of the language – one based on the dialect of Kandahar and one on the dialect of Peshawar.
• In Afghanistan, Dari is the more prestigious language, used in business and higher education. But Pashto is a required subject in schools and the lyrics of Afghanistan’s national anthem are in Pashto.

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.