For any marketing organization, it is important to reach the targeted audience in their first language for the content to be understood properly by them. Whether you aim at telemarketing or making promotional videos for your products, more than often you will require adding a translated text or a voice-over to make it understood by your targeted customers especially for non-English speakers. Apart from the language you also need your audio to be in a voice that sounds authoritative, convincing and the kind that will pull more attention. So just translating the audio is not enough and you need to invest in selecting talents that carry the potential of bringing you more business. Given this scenario, it would be pertinent to familiarize yourself with a few alternatives of voice-over recording.

1. Off-screen voice-over
If you have an animated promotional video along with its translated text, voice-over utilizes the translated text to sync each line up with the video. This forms rather a straight forward way to match the original version with the translated one.

2. UN-style voice-over
UN-style voice over is used when the targeted audience is familiar with the people in the video or are recognizable. This option records over the sounds of the speaker without replacing it. At the start of the audio, you hear the speaker’s voice and then when his volume is lowered, the target translation voice will increase so that the viewer understands and relates to the genuine voice. The sync points should be perfectly timed at the start of the dialogue to lower the degree of difficulty to sync.

3. Voice replacement
Using this technique you replace the voice from your video with the one in the targeted language by simply muting the original voice. This technique is more difficult since the voice talent has to work to match the voices with the original language and you would need one talent each for every speaker in the video.

4. Dubbing
A closest match for you to time into a foreign language, dubbing is very popular to use for the translation of promotional videos. The talent studies the lip movements of the actors to get the closest match to the original in the target language. Extensive talent is required in this case to lip sync with the people from the video with the translated narration. Also the entire voice-over process includes several steps, requiring a great deal of training. This makes the technique much more expensive than the other techniques, but is also equally powerful and rewarding.

There are ways by which you can streamline the video localization process:

• Explain regional details of your targeted audience to your translation
partner so that they can find talent best suits your brand.
• Send the video for review by experts.
• Send the video transcript to be used in the localized video.
• Provide the original source video files to your translation partner.
• Acquaint your voice talent with your company’s specifics so that they can
learn more about your requirements.
• Provide a pronunciation guide for the talent to be used.
• Provide a glossary of key English terms and their meanings, if available.

By understanding and utilizing audiovisual you will have the tools needed to generate an accurate and effective localized video for your target audience. This will help you reach out to a more diverse audience and turn it into your clientele.