Croatian 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 Croatian language

Croatian belongs to the Southern Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. The three main Slavic language groups – Eastern, Western and Southern – developed from the 6th century onwards, with the spread of the Slav people from Old Poland throughout Eastern Europe.

Written Croatian can be traced back to the 12th century (possibly even back to the 9th century), but it wasn’t until the 19th century that a standardised version – using a Latin script – emerged. This was based on the Shtokavian dialect – also common to Serbian and Bosnian.

With the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the Second World War, there was a political movement to bring the three mutually intelligible languages together as one. This was called Serbo-Croatian.

After the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, each of the successor countries focused on re-establishing their individual languages as a way of promoting national identity. In Croatia this has involved setting up regulatory bodies to oversee the independent development of the language.

Which countries have Croatian as a national language?

Croatian is the official language of the Republic of Croatia, and one of three official languages of Bosnia-Herzegovina (along with Bosnian and Serbian).

Croatian is also recognised as an official minority language in Montenegro as well as the regions of Burgenland in Austria, Molise in Italy, Baranya County in Hungary and Vojvodina in Serbia. It has co-official status in the Romanian communes of Carasova and Lupac.

Croatian is one of the official languages of the European Union.

How many people speak Croatian as their first language?

It is estimated that around six million people Croatian as their first language.

Did you know?

• There are three main Croatian dialects – Cakavian (spoken mostly along the coast and on the Adriatic islands), Kajkavian (spoken in the north of the country) and Shtokavian (spoken in the rest of the country).
• Croatian is very similar to Bosnian and Serbian in its spoken form – they are mutually intelligible and more similar than American, Australian and British English. There are differences in their written forms, however – Serbian uses a Cyrillic script, Croatian uses a Latin script, and Bosnian uses both.
• It is widely believed that the term ‘Serbo-Croatian’ was first used in 1824 by Jacob Grimm, German dictionary maker and folklorist (one of the Brothers Grimm).

The Croatian economy

Croatia’s service-based economy was badly hit first by the 1991-95 war, then by the 2008 global economic downturn. Issues affecting the economy today include high foreign debt, high unemployment and over-reliance on tourism.

The service sector accounts for 70% of GDP, the industrial sector accounts for 25% of GDP, and agriculture/forestry/fishing accounts for the final 5%. Around 42% of the population lives in rural areas and around 14% of the country’s labour force is employed in agriculture.

Croatia joined NATO in 2009 and the European Union in 2013.