Cantonese Voiceover and Dubbing

Your audience speaks Cantonese – but more importantly, they have a distinct cultural identity. To connect with these listeners and viewers, you need more than a translation app or dictionary – you need authenticity.

The linguists at SPG Studios are acutely aware of how word choice, phrasing, and accents influence perception and meaning. Our Cantonese specialists and voice talent deliver that nuance and context. They are aware of unique regional characteristics both within southern China and among Hong Kong, Macau, and the ethnically Chinese communities in neighboring countries. Moreover, their work passes through both peer review and quality control to ensure the finished product is culturally relevant and immersive.

The result is high-quality localization, and it’s what SPG has done for over 30 years for clients as diverse as film studios, gaming companies, universities, web content providers, Fortune 500 companies and the ad agencies that serve them.

Why should you localize your content for Cantonese-speaking markets?

Cantonese is spoken in 13 countries and has 80.4 million people who speak it as their first language. It is the dominant language in the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces in China, as well as Macau and Hong Kong, and is widely spoken in Malaysia and several countries in Southeast Asia. Established communities also speak Cantonese in the Western Hemisphere.

The oldest and most-established mercantile hubs within China are primarily Cantonese speaking, and the language holds significant sway within economically vibrant Southeast Asian nations such as Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Whether you are looking to dub, subtitle, or narrate, localizing into Cantonese gives you access to these Cantonese-speaking regions, as well as thriving expatriate communities worldwide. International companies have enjoyed great success localizing their marketing and ad campaigns, training videos, TV and radio spots, VOD (video on demand), e-learning materials, video games, and more into Cantonese.

Over the past 30+ years, SPG has provided localization services in Cantonese and for feature films, TV and other episodic series, documentaries, video games, web content, commercials, TV and radio spots, e-learning and training videos. In the majority of cases, we’re asked to provide voice-overs, narrations, or dubs, which are sometimes referred to as video dubbing or audio translation. Sometimes clients also need us to prepare subtitles, translations, graphics localization, and other media services.

SPG has lots of friends (朋友們; Péngyǒumen in Pinyin) in the Cantonese-speaking world! We work with a large and diverse range of native Cantonese voice artists, directors, localization experts, and recording and mixing engineers. Depending on the content type and project goals, we can employ:

• “UN style” voice-over, which plays “on top of” the original dialog
• Narration that replaces the original, or
• Lip-sync dubbing, which synchronizes to lip movements and reflects the tone and emotional quality of the original speaker

All three styles require linguists to translate the as-recorded script to bring every nuance of your source material into Cantonese. Dubbing requires the added step of adapting the script to optimize the sync between our recorded Cantonese audio and the original visuals. SPG’s best-in-class adapters scrutinize each word and phrase to ensure the dubbed performance conveys the exact “feel” of the original.

For many clients, the most crucial step in the process is casting Cantonese voices. SPG can manage the entire process, or present you with filtered or unfiltered lists of voice samples. We can offer a near-limitless variety of ages, styles, tonal quality, and performance capabilities. SPG has dubbed children singing, aliens speaking a made-up language, and everything in between!

Other critical steps in the process include:

• Pairing Cantonese voice talent with session directors and talented recording engineers
• Editing, mixing, and post-production services that ensure the audio quality sounds perfect
• File transfer, digital asset management, efficient workflow tools, and secure digital rights management

After recording is complete, we turn our attention to the graphics localization of onscreen text, titles/credits, “lower thirds”, and other written material. To fully immerse your audience, all relevant text should be in traditional Chinese script, which is preferred in the Cantonese-speaking world!

When text or narration is preferable to lip-sync voice dubbing, SPG offers subtitling, closed captioning, and audio description services. Our roster of Cantonese translators, linguists, adapters, and editors have extensive experience creating subtitles and closed captions in a timely and cost-effective manner. We also employ audio description specialists with thousands of hours of experience delivering information to the sight-impaired community.