Brazilian Portuguese Voiceover and Dubbing

Word choice, phrasing, accents – humans process dozens of subtle cues when listening to another voice. To engage an audience, it’s not enough to be linguistically accurate; you have to be authentic. SPG’s Brazilian Portuguese language specialists and voice talent deliver both. Our multi-step process includes both peer review and quality control to ensure your project 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 Brazil?

Brazil has the 8th largest economy in the world by nominal GDP, and the largest in Latin America. It also has the fifth-largest economy by purchasing power parity, making it a great market to enter for many brands and organizations. Brazil is especially present online, with the fourth-largest number of connected users in the world, creating an abundance of opportunities for international companies to expand.

There are approximately 211 million people in Brazil who speak Portuguese, which is about 20 times more than the number of residents in Portugal. Brazilian Portuguese (or “BPO”) differs from its Iberian counterpart in pronunciation, vocabulary, and to a lesser extent grammar and spelling.

Whether you are looking to dub, subtitle, or narrate, localizing in Brazilian Portuguese gives you access not only to Brazil itself but to a thriving community of several million expatriates. International companies have enjoyed great success localizing their marketing and ad campaigns, videos, TV and radio spots, VOD (video on demand), e-learning materials, video games, and more into Brazilian Portuguese.

Over the past 30+ years, SPG has provided BPO localization services 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 amigos e amigas (friends) in Brazil! We work with a very large and diverse range of native Brazilian 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 Brazilian Portuguese. Dubbing requires the added step of adapting the script to optimize the sync between our recorded BPO 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 Brazilian 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 BPO 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 Brazilian Portuguese!

When text or narration is preferable to lip-sync voice dubbing, SPG offers subtitling, closed captioning, and audio description services. Our roster of Brazilian 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.