Arabic Accent Voice Over Recordings

Working with translation and production companies

Adding audio visual services to your mix will create many new sales opportunities for your team. We can add translation, voice over 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.

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.

If you are a translation company, we will send you some helpful guidelines for providing us with copy or scripts, as they will need to be formatted correctly for voicing or for subtitling. If you are a production company, we can organise translations and create the subtitles in your preferred format. Voice over recordings can be supplied as edited files, or we can remix with the original music and effects and layback to complete the new video soundtrack, 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.

Origins of the Arabic language and accent

Arabic is spoken by people who live in the Middle East and in North Africa. It is also the religious language of the world’s Muslims and the Holy Quran is written in Arabic.

There are two forms of Arabic used today. The first is Modern Standard, which is used by the majority of the people and is used on the TV, radio and newspapers. The second is Classical Arabic which is used in literary and religious scripts.

Spoken Arabic has four main dialects:

• Maghreb Arabic – It is spoken in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya and it is a spoken language. Standard Arabic is used for texts. The language contains loan words from French, and also from English.
• Egyptian Arabic – Spoken in Egypt and the Sudan. This dialect is well-known due to the popularity of Egyptian made films and TV shows throughout the Arab region. The most prestigious dialect is called Cairene and it comes from Cairo.
• Levantine Arabic – From Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine. This is a language that is also spoken by the Desert Bedouins. It is close to classical Arabic. It is said to have originated from speakers of the Aramaic languages.
• Iraqi Gulf Arabic – Spoken in Iraq and the gulf regions. It is only spoken by around 200,000 Arabic speakers and it is not understood by speakers in Saudi Arabia for instance.

The Arab language was spread around the Middle East as traders and settlers came and went in those regions. There are areas which still speak the Arab languages of Berber, Mahri and Jebali, although less people speak these dialects nowadays and they are slowly being left to pockets of small communities.

Many other languages have Arab words in their vocabulary, especially Spanish as it was ruled by the Arabs and also Turkish and Persian. For a glimpse into the Arabian accent, have a look at this You Tube Video with the late Omar Sharif talking English with an Arab accent.