Thai Voiceover and Dubbing

To connect with these listeners and viewers, you need more than a translation app or dictionary – you need cultural authenticity.

The linguists at SPG Studios are acutely aware of how word choice, phrasing, and accents influence perception and meaning. Our Thai-language specialists and voice talent deliver that nuance and context. 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 Thai-speaking markets?

There are more than 43 million Thai speakers worldwide. In addition to being the official language of Thailand, it is a recognized minority language in Cambodia, Malaysia, and Myanmar.

Thailand has the 2nd largest economy in Southeast Asia and is recognized by the World Bank as “one of the great development success stories” in social and development indicators. It’s gross domestic product of $500 billion includes a wide range of industries from automobiles and agriculture to financial services, tourism and textiles.

Whether you are looking to dub, subtitle, or narrate, localizing into Thai gives you access not only to the core population in Southeast Asia, but also thriving expatriate communities in the United States, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and various Western European nations. 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 Thai.

Over the past 30+ years, SPG has provided Thai 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 เพื่อน (Pheụ̄̀xn, or friends) in Thailand! We work with a large and diverse range of native Thai-speaking 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 Thai. Dubbing requires the added step of adapting the script to optimize the sync between our recorded Thai 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 Thai 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 Thai 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 Thai script!

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