Serbian 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 Serbian language

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

Serbian is derived from Old Church Slavic, which was spoken by most Slavic people in the 9th to 11th centuries. After this most of the Slavic languages began to differentiate themselves, although Serbian and Croatian did not establish themselves as separate from each other until much later.

The modern Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was devised in 1814, and the standard written form of the language was established in 1850 by a group of Serbian (and Croatian) writers and linguists. This was based on the Shtokavian dialect.

Serbian, Croatian and Montenegrin are largely mutually intelligible languages; they were treated as a single Serbo-Croatian language within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, each of the successor countries focused on re-establishing their individual languages as a way of promoting their national identity.

Which countries have Serbian as a national language?

Serbian is an official language in Serbia, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is recognised as a minority language in Croatia, Hungary, Montenegro, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Macedonia, Albania and Romania.

How many people speak Serbian as their first language?

It is estimated that approximately nine million people speak Serbian as their first language. It is the most widely spoken of the South Slavic languages.

Did you know…

• As well as the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (devised in 1814), there is also a Serbian Latin alphabet (devised in 1830). Serbian is one of the only standard European languages to use both, with Serbian speakers able to read both scripts equally well.
• In addition to the standard Shtokavian dialect, other main variants include Ijekavian (spoken in Bosina and Herzegovina, Montenegro, south-west Serbia and Croatia), Ekavian and Torlakian (both spoken mostly in Serbia).

The Serbian economy

Serbia has a transitional economy, in the process of moving from a planned economy to a market economy. The service sector accounts for around 64% of GDP, industry 24% and agriculture 13%. In 2013 the country’s GDP growth was among the top ten of European countries.

Serbia was granted candidate status for the European Union in 2012.