How to Cast the Right Foreign-Language Voice-over Talent for a Project

Casting for foreign-language voice-over projects can be very tricky – especially when picking the talents for languages in which one is not a native speaker. For starters, it’s impossible to pick a native from a non-native speaker, unless you’re a native speaker of that language as well. However, this is a position that multimedia translation managers are put in every day.

This blog post will provide 5 essential tips to help you cast the right foreign-language talents for your localization project – even when you don’t speak the languages.

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Voice and performance qualities don’t carry from one language to another

As part of the quoting process, the localization manager will receive a suite of voice samples – usually 2-3 per talent needed, depending on the language – from which to pick. But how do you pick the right one? How can a non-native speaker really decide which Hmong voice over talent exudes warmth and wisdom? How does a stressed person sound in Japanese – and when does a certain performance start to sound overdone?

This task may seem overwhelming, but it’s manageable – just keep in mind the following tips.

1. Remember that voice talent qualities may not translate from one language to another.

How we, as native English speakers, perceive emotion, context or intent – whether it’s friendliness, sadness, anger, intimacy, formality – is different from how it’s perceived in other languages and cultures. Friendliness is a good example. In US marketing videos, friendliness is generally chipper, sometimes even aggressively energetic, and can even lead to louder reads. When coming from a Portuguese or Spanish-speaking Latin American voice talent, this can seem a bit too much to the local audience. Brazilian friendliness, in particular, will generally sound more intimate to an American ear, but just right to an audience in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo. Likewise, corporate recordings in the US can be relatively informal – for example, colloquialisms are commonly-used in e-Learning materials – while in Latin America they tend to be more formal, with VO work to match.

2. Make sure that the talents you review are fully-native speakers.

This may sound obvious, but voice recordings done by non-native speakers are quite common, especially when the talents come from casting agencies, since they generally provide talents for movies, TV shows, and other projects targeted to a US audience. This also especially true for Spanish, French and British English voice talents in the US, since many actors either have studied those languages, or have practice at faking a British accent. This is also true for both union and non-union voice-over talents, since unions don’t check for native fluency either.

There are really only two ways to make sure that you get only native-speaking voice talents. You can hire a native-speaker VO expert to test each talent to spot potential accent issues, which can take hours. Or, you can hire a studio or voice over agency that provides only native-speaking talents, and guarantees their native fluency, like JBI Studios. Remember: just because a talent speaks a language, and even sounds good to a non-native ear, that does not mean that he or she is a native speaker. And a non-native speaker, even a really fluent one, will always sound wrong to a native audience.

(If you’re not sure what a native speaker is, check out our previous post Who exactly is a native speaker for foreign-language voice-over?)

3. Rely on your in-country team members.

This can be any part of your team that’s in a region for which you’re localizing, whether sales people, local employees, or even in-country consultants. If you have access to any of these people, their input in the voice selection process will be invaluable. Your in-country employees know your market and your product, as well as your staff, and how to effectively communicate with them, better than anyone else. Engage them in the process early, and send them the voice samples to review.

4. Rely on an experienced, native-speaker language director.

This is something that most voice talent agencies don’t provide, but which is crucial to successful voice over recordings. A native-speaking language director will do three things for a localization session. First, he or she will help the talents find the right performance for a project, and check the final work for proper pronunciation. Second, they are fluent in English, and provide a crucial bridge between the client, project manager and the voice talent (remember that many native talents aren’t fluent in English, and some can’t even speak it).  Third, they coordinate the session with studio engineer, working closely to ensure that the final recordings are consistent and of the highest quality. Again, this is something that JBI provides with every project.

5. If you don’t have to match the gender or age of your English-language talent, widen your casting.

It’s common to match the gender and age of the original source content in the localized versions. Sometimes, it’s even crucial to the project – for example, if you’re lip-sync dubbing an on-screen speaker who’s female, you’ll need to match her gender. If it’s not necessary for technical reasons, though, consider casting from a wide talent pool of both male and female, and older and younger talents. First, it’ll open up the number of voice talents available, giving you more choices from which to pick. Second, it’ll help you to think about the essence of your voice – is it wise, or nurturing, or intelligent, or sardonic? These are not gender- or age-based qualities, and casting from a larger talent pool may help you to find the voice that really possesses that essence. Moreover, some languages – especially those that have a relatively small number of speakers – will also have smaller talent pools. Gender- and age-blind casting will give you more talents from which to choose in those languages.

Communicate your talent needs as accurately as possible

In general, communication with your studio or localization company is crucial to the success of a localization project. More specifically, it can really improve the casting of a project. When you start out, provide a casting description that’s as specific as possible, and that gets across what you want from the talent. Do you want someone who sounds authoritative but welcoming? Someone who’s funny? Do you have specific age requirements – for example, for a driver training film, do you need a talent who sounds like they’re young enough to not have a license? The more information and specificity that you can provide early on in the project, the better the casting results.