Romanian 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 Romanian language

Romanian belongs to the Eastern Romance sub-group of the Italic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It is unique in that it is the only Romance language spoken in Eastern Europe today.

The Eastern Romance languages descended from Vulgar Latin during the days of the Roman Empire. The name Romania comes from the Latin word ‘Romanus’. Little is known about the development of Proto-Romanian before the 10th century, when the region came under the influence of the Byzantine Empire.

During the Middle Ages, Romanian was influenced by the Slavic languages (taking it in rather a different direction to most other Romance languages), and also by Greek. The oldest example of written Romanian is a letter dating back to 1521. The first Romanian grammar was published in Vienna in 1780. Standard literary Romanian evolved from the Daco-Romanian dialect spoken in southern Romania.

Romanian is spoken in Moldova as well as Romania. In Moldova it is generally called Moldovan, although there is an ongoing debate about whether it is a separate language or not.

Which countries have Romanian as a national language?

Romanian is the official language of Romania, and also of Moldova (where its name is contested). It also has official status in the autonomous Serbian province of Vojvodina, and the autonomous Mount Athos in Greece.

How many people speak Romanian as their first language?

It is estimated that approximately 24 million people speak Romanian as their first language, mainly in Romania and Moldova.

Did you know…

• There are four main Romanian dialects: Daco-Romanian, which is the basis of standard Romanian, spoken in Romania and Moldova; Aromanian (or Macedo-Romanian), spoken in parts of Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo and Serbia; Megleno-Romanian, spoken in northern Greece (where it is almost extinct); and Istro-Romanian, spoken on the Istrian Peninsula of Croatia (also almost extinct).
• The Romanian alphabet has 31 letters, similar to the English alphabet but with five additional diacritics – ă (like the ‘a’ in ‘musical’), ș (pronounced ‘sh’), ț (pronounced ‘ts’), â, î (pronounced the same, with no English equivalent).
• Romanian has 100 words in common with Albanian, which occur only in these two languages. Linguists believe this indicates that Romanian and Albanian both have roots in the same earlier Balkan language – possibly Dacian.

The Romanian economy

Romania has a developing market economy, the 17th largest in the European Union based on nominal GDP and the 13th largest based on PPP.

Between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the global financial crisis of 2008/09, Romania’s economic growth was among the fastest in Europe (more than three times the EU average in 2008). Romania joined the EU in 2007.

Agriculture is important (employing around 30% of the country’s workforce), although under-developed. Romania has the highest proportion of rural population in the EU (45%) and the highest incidence of rural poverty (70%), with one of the largest gaps in living standards between urban and rural areas.