Somali 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 Somali language

Somali (Af-Soomaali) belongs to the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages. It is classified as Lowland East Cushitic, along with Afar and Saho. Somali is the best documented of all the Cushitic languages (with studies going back to the late 19th century), and the only one granted official status in any country.

The influence of Islam has been important in the development of the language; it is estimated that around 20% of Somali vocabulary is derived from Arabic. A number of loanwords were borrowed from English during the colonial period, and trade with the Near East and South Asia has brought in words from Persian, Urdu and Hindi.

An official writing system based on the Latin alphabet was adopted in 1972, and in 1973 the Somali language was designated as the official language of the Somali Democratic Republic.

Which countries have Somali as a national language?

Somali is one of two official languages of Somalia (along with Arabic, which is spoken mostly in the north and in coastal towns). It is also recognised as a minority language in Djibouti and Ethiopia.

How many people speak Somali as their first language?

It is estimated that approximately 16 million people speak Somali as their first language – mainly in Somali (by around 95% of the population), Ethiopia, Djibouti, Yemen and Kenya. Somali is the second most widely spoken Cushitic language after Oromo.

Did you know…

• Before the Latin script was adopted in 1972, the main way of writing Somali was using an Arabic-based alphabet called Osmanya.
• There are three main Somali dialect groups: Northern (the basis for standard Somali); Benaadir (spoken on the Bedadir coast); and Maay (spoken by the Digil and Mirifle clans of southern Somalia and, although traditionally classified as Somali, largely unintelligible to many Somali speakers).
• As of 2013, Somali is one of the featured languages available on Google Translate.

The Somali economy

Despite ongoing civil unrest, criminal activity and lack of national government, Somalia has a healthy informal economy. This is based on livestock, remittance/money transfer companies (there are no banks) and telecommunications (Somalia has one of the strongest telecommunications sectors in Africa).

A large portion of the population is made up of nomads, who are dependent on livestock for their livelihood. It is estimated that livestock accounts for around 40% of the country’s GDP, and 50% of export earnings.