What you need to know about dialects for voice-over translation

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Our clients often ask us what the difference is between a dialect and a language, and how that affects voice-over translation. There’s no easy answer to this, in part because the two terms are laden with political and historical concerns. And of course, because audio production often has other determining factors, like regional accent, that don’t line up neatly with language or dialect classifications. Still, it’s important to know a bit about these terms to avoid issues in localization.

This blog post will examine what dialects are as compared languages, and what you need to know about them for foreign-language VO localization projects.

[Average read time: 4 minutes]

What are dialects and languages?

We all know what a language is – it’s a closed, complex system of communication used by a particular group of people. It’s also easy to tell one language from another, especially if the languages have a governing body, like the Real Academia Española (for Spanish) and the Académie française (for French). Some languages are quite similar – like Spanish and Italian – but one of the features of languages is that they are mutually unintelligible – that is to say, a Spanish speaker will not understand an English speaker based on language alone.

So what is a dialect? Per the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a dialect is “a regional variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation from other regional varieties and constituting together with them a single language.” The definition goes on to say that dialects can be defined as well to social groups or classes.

So why the confusion?

Because the terms above get misused on a regular basis.

For example, think of the Italian language – it’s now the official and national language of Italy, and it has an agreed-upon, standardized vocabulary and grammar. However, it started out as the Tuscan language, spoken in Florence and the surrounding areas, but it became a kind of lingua franca to the upper or educated classes, in great part thanks to the popularity of works by Machiavelli, Boccaccio, and most importantly, Dante. During the Italian nationalist movements of the mid-19th century, it was thought that this language could serve to unite the disparate states on the peninsula – however, by the time of creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, only a very small minority could speak it. It was with the spread of public education (in this standard Italian) and through the demographic movements of World War I that Italian came to be spoken by the population at large – so that today, this is what you’d record if you had an Italian voice over project.

Similar processes occurred in Germany and France, where nationalist movements during the 19th century promoted particular regional languages to national prominence. For example, if you record German voiceover, you’re recording a version of German that was standardized at the turn of the last century. In fact, one of the reasons for the promotion of national languages was the belief in emerging nationalist ideology that a singular language was one of the conditions for self-determination. Essentially, part of being a nation – and of exercising political autonomy – was having a national language. Thus the famous line, “a language is a dialect with an army and navy,” popularized by Max Weinreich.

Or to put it another way, language and dialect are historical and political terms as often as real linguistic classifications. This leads to terminological contradictions.

Some languages are mutually intelligible

Serbo-Croatian is a great example. The languages spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Montenegro are mutually intelligible, and in fact are considered by many linguists to be regional variants of the same language, even closer to one another than US and British English. However, the area was controlled by the Ottoman Empire and then was a satellite of the Soviet Union, and this led to a lot of regional strife. The breakup of Yugoslavia led to nationalist movements in each of these regions, and this entailed creating a national language based on ethnic identity – thus the emergence of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian as languages.

This nationalist insistence on language identity doesn’t limit itself to areas that have seen conflict. Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are very close linguistically, and their speakers can understand one another with relative ease – however, they are classified as separate languages. Likewise, Dari and Farsi – the languages spoken in Afghanistan and Iran, respectively – are quite similar as well, so much so that the Academy of Persian Language and Literature calls both languages variants Persian, which they are historically.

Some so-called dialects are mutually unintelligible

Chinese is considered a language, with Mandarin and Cantonese as dialects. However, if you played a Mandarin voiceover recording to a Cantonese speaker, the latter would not understand it. A Cantonese speaker wouldn’t be able to read the script either, for the most part, since Mandarin uses a simplified version of the Chinese characters that is not familiar to Cantonese speaker, who use the traditional writing system. Cantonese and Mandarin are further apart linguistically than French and Italian – yet they’re considered dialects.

 

A similar issue occurs with Arabic. Speakers in Egypt will not understand speakers from Lebanon, nor will they in turn understand a speaker from Saudi Arabia. There is a Modern Standard Arabic, which is used in literary and academic circles, but it is not spoken by everyone in the Middle East. Therefore, when recording Arabic voiceover, it’s crucial to know that there isn’t one variant that will reach the entire Arabic-speaking world, even though it’s considered one language.

So what do you need to know for voice over recording?

In short, that dialects and languages are historical and political classifications, much more than linguistic ones. And that they don’t don’t necessarily have a bearing on voice over recording, which has to take accent, intelligibility and political considerations into account, much more so than a dialect/language classification.

Moreover, voice production also has regional standards that are more pertinent than dialect or language distinctions. Take Latin America – while there are distinct dialects of Latin American Spanish all the way from Mexico to Chile, there is also a neutral Spanish accent that was established as a convention in the late 20th century, and which is generally acceptable for corporate and academic usage throughout most of the region, with the main exception being Argentina and Uruguay. However, for marketing and creative content, which is generally more local and colloquial, you’d want to record in more local accents – down to the regional variant, in some cases.

So what should you do? Focus on what your content requires. Who is your audience? What language do they speak? What language will they understand? How will you retain their engagement? If you’re not sure, consult with in-country partners or with a partner foreign-language production house, like JBI Studios. And do this ahead of time, since these decisions will affect casting – and that affects budgets and timelines. As with all kinds of localization (as well as audio and video translation), planning ahead and thoroughly is the only way to keep projects on time, and on budget.