Ukrainian 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 Ukrainian language

Ukrainian belongs to the East Slavic sub-group of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It is closely related to Russian and Belarusian, and is the second most widely spoken of the 12 surviving members of the Slavic language branch (after Russian).

Ukrainian has its roots in Old East Slavic, and can be traced back to the early medieval state of Kievan Rus’, which united Ukraine, Russia and Moldova between the 9th and 13th centuries. Old East Slavic was the colloquial language used in the state during this period.

During its development Ukrainian has been strongly influenced by other languages, including Russian, Belarusian, Polish and Slovak. The earliest written records of Ukrainian date back to the end of the 16th century, which is when it is generally thought to have begun diverging significantly from Russian.

At the end of the 19th century, under Russian rule, Ukrainian was banned. From 1919 to 1991, under Soviet rule, it became marginalised as Russian was the main language of work and education. When Ukraine declared independence in 1991, Ukrainian was reinstated as the country’s official language and became a focus of national identity.

Which countries have Ukrainian as a national language?

Ukrainian is the official language of Ukraine, and is official at a regional level in Moldova (in the breakaway state of Transnistria).

It is recognised as a minority language in Moldova, Hungary, Serbia, Poland, Romania, Croatia, Slovakia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Czech Republic.

How many people speak Ukrainian as their first language?

It is estimated that around 40-50 million people speak Ukrainian as their first language in countries all around the world, as well as in Ukraine. These include Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Paraguay, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and the United States.

Did you know…

• There is not a huge diversity of Ukrainian dialects, but there are slight variations which are normally divided into the northern dialects, the southwestern dialects and the southeastern dialects. Standard Ukrainian is largely based on the Poltava-Kyiv dialects of the southeastern group.
• Belarusian shares the highest percentage of common vocabulary with Ukrainian (84%), followed by Polish (70%), Serbo-Croatian (68%), Slovak (66%) and Russian (62%).

The Ukrainian economy

Ukraine’s GDP fell sharply for the first 10 years after gaining independence from the Soviet Union, but things turned around between 2000 and 2008, when the economy experienced rapid growth.

The country was badly affected by the 2008 global financial crisis, but has since begun to recover. Over 60% of Ukraine’s exports go to other former Soviet states, including Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Ukraine is rich in natural resources, particularly mineral deposits. Industry contributes around a quarter of the country’s GDP.