Better business Results with Multilingual Voiceover
How do you find the perfect voice for your multilingual voice over?
When it comes to multilingual voiceovers, depending on what content you’re creating, you need a voice/accent to match. If you’re a Swiss private bank, then a jovial, jokey voice won’t cut it. After all, you’d want to convey trustworthiness and dependability. Likewise, if you’re advertising a sporting event or a pop concert, you wouldn’t want a stuffy, professional-sounding narrator voice. It’d just be too boring.
But how do you decide? There is a wealth of research on how various voices and accents affect audience engagement. Read on to find out more.
Accent bias
Whether you like it or not, we live in a hierarchical society. Some people believe that changing your accent is as important as dressing smartly for a job interview. In the UK, received pronunciation, or RP, is the term for what many would call an upper-class accent. BBC broadcasters used to train in this accent to convey authority, hence its ‘BBC English’ moniker. And former prime minister Margaret Thatcher ditched her north Lincolnshire accent and deepened her narrator voice to convey authority in what was then a male-dominated arena. It worked.
Going in the opposite direction, upper-class politicians, such as former UK chancellor George Osbourne, who attended boarding school and Oxford University, have been known to adopt a more working-class accent to appeal to a wider section of the electorate. Comedians have parodied this as a ‘mockney’ accent. But why bother?
Research shows it takes listeners just 30 milliseconds to form an opinion as to what a person’s accent reveals about the speaker’s ethnic and social background. This process comprises an element of bias and assumption. This is bias in action.
These assumptions can encompass sexuality, ethnic identity, socioeconomic status and even character. Listeners, research shows, react differently to different accents, even if there is no evidence on which to base these assumptions. Knowing how this process works will help you identify which type of narrator voice and accent are most suitable for your content voiceover.
Attitudes to accents
Though we should all try to challenge our unfounded accent biases, the truth is that these prejudices exist and are likely to continue. Accents that are commonly perceived to be standard, whether that’s Beijing accented Mandarin or RP, are perceived to be of higher prestige and thus are better suited for higher-status professional content.
One element of standard pronunciation that has been proven is that listeners generally think speakers with this accent are smarter than the general population. Pleasantness is also attributed to standard accent speakers. This is true across various cultures. For example, in Singapore, which has a sizeable Chinese population, research shows citizens perceive Taiwanese, Beijing and Singaporean-accented Mandarin differently. Beijing-accented Chinese is viewed more favourably than the local accent. Only a highly experienced multilingual voice-over services provider could advise on the type of accent/voice needed to match the content.
Accents convey a lot of information about the speaker and, therefore the product or service they are talking about
Positive vs negative traits
Discrimination based on accents is very real and is part of what makes us human. After all, when competing with fellow tribes over resources millennia ago, it was important to distinguish which person belonged to what group.
In the modern day, this is reflected in the numerous polls that seek to find the world’s sexiest or most trustworthy accent. In a recent global poll of 2,500 single men and women, Scottish men (think Outlander) and Spanish women (think Penelope Cruz) were determined to have the world’s sexiest accents, though these findings tend to change with each new survey.
Women favoured the following accents:
Scottish 86%
Irish 77%
Italian 68%
French 61%
Spanish 56%
Brazilian Portuguese 48%
Queen’s English 47%
Australian 35%
South African 29%
Mexican 23%
Men favoured the following accents:
Spanish 88%
Brazilian Portuguese 76%
Australian 72%
French 69%
American 62%
Kiwi 54%
Czech 47%
Italian 43%
Mexican 31%
Scottish 29%
In Asia, one study found that listeners expressed a positive perception of Taiwanese-accented Chinese, even though it is thought of as a non-standard dialect.
It’s not only the voice that can prompt accent bias. One study found that a person’s face can affect how a listener perceives their voice. This research shows that seeing an Asian face makes American English appear more accented. However, this aspect isn’t so important when it comes to voiceovers.
What accent do you find to be the most trustworthy?
Multilingual voice-over tips
Given the myriad perceptions different voices and accents can convey, an expert voice-over service provider can recommend the perfect match for your content. Most importantly, you’ll need to identify your consumer persona. You need to determine exactly who you want to engage. Is it middle-aged dads, young students, or female retirees? The voice will need to match. Also, you’ll need to align the voice and accent with your product or service. For example, if you’re selling legal or financial services, a deeper standard accent tends to convey authority and dependability. If you’re targeting a younger demographic and your service is music-streaming, a young voice and hip accent are more appropriate. Also, consider the reach of the language and accent/voice. For example, if you’re in Hong Kong, consider whether Mandarin or Cantonese would be the best fit. One consideration to bear in mind is where in China they speak Cantonese. Then you’d need to settle on the accent.
When looking for a voice-over service provider, make sure they can provide a range of voices and accents. You don’t want to be shoe-horned into an inappropriate voice if the service provider doesn’t have a wide enough range on offer.
If the voiceover is part of a social media marketing campaign, it’s worth considering engaging a popular influencer that appeals to your audience persona.
Final thoughts
Whether you’re looking at eLearning voice-over or voice-over podcasts, navigating the nuances of voice-overs is much more complicated than first appears. Getting it wrong could result in a waste of resources and a product or service that flops. Seek the advice of an expert and professional voice dubbing service provider. They will be able to determine the right fit for not only the audience segment you’re targeting but for the product or service you are selling and will find the most appropriate narrator’s voice. Whether you’re doing eLearning translation, multilingual SEO, additional dialogue recording or animation production, getting the voice-over right is critical. It is this alignment that determines the success of a voice-over project. Get in touch today to explore your voice-over options.