Voiceover in German

Whether chasing a different audience or trying to be a global player, making content available in multiple languages is essential. Perhaps you’re in Germany or want to reach German customers, but you don’t speak Deutsch. Adding a voiceover to your existing content is often enough to use video and audio presentations.

You may be surprised to learn that creating and synching a German voiceover to an English video or audio segment is easier than you think. This article covers how voiceovers work and the best ways to create a fantastic corporate video with foreign language voiceovers.

What is a voiceover?

Voiceovers are narrations recorded in a studio setting. Unlike actors recorded on set, voiceovers don’t necessarily have an on-screen presence. As a production technique, voiceovers provide narrations, explanations, and additional auditory benefits.

Typically, studios hire voice actors to record voiceovers. In movies, actors can record voiceovers to correct recording mistakes during filming. However, voiceovers are standard in multiple media, from animation to theater to film making to promotional content creation.

For example, you hear voiceovers in audiobooks and narrators telling the story and playing different characters. You can also listen to voiceovers in advertising regardless of the TV channel. Product and brand presentations also benefit from voiceovers to provide additional explanations and spark engagement.

This off-stage commentary almost always serves two purposes. It can either tell a story or offer informational, educational, and instructional speech to video, audio, and text content.

Why might you need a German voiceover

Narration and non-narration voiceovers have many uses. If you want to reach out to a German audience, a German voiceover can help in the following areas:

• Creating or dubbing e-learning materials
• Making corporate videos
• Creating product presentations
• Dubbing video game content
• Dubbing podcasts
• Making radio and TV ads
• Messages for IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems
• Creating marketing and promotional content
• Providing educational information in workshop tutorials
• Reaching a native German audience
• Helping German learners pick up important phrases

Where can you get a German voiceover?

Hire a professional voice artist

The German language isn’t easy to learn for anyone. It differs greatly from English and languages with Latin influences like Spanish, Italian, etc. That doesn’t mean your voiceover project should suffer.

Many voice artists can go into a recording studio and offer a German narration in a proper German accent. Some may even help you with German translations or work from subtitles to dub dialogue and sync it to a video.

Naturally, finding a voice artist or actor who speaks German isn’t enough—you also need to find someone with experience in your type of voiceover project. Some people can do character voices, others have powerful voices for ads and trailers and the diction and cadence to record corporate narrations.

However, hiring a voice actor may also require renting a recording studio and adding extra expenses, and there is no guarantee you will find a voice actor with the type of voice you need for your project.

Do it yourself

You can also try recording your explainer video or presentation if you know German. Depending on the quality you seek, you can make do with a decent microphone and a good audio editor.

It’s important to remember that voiceovers are supposed to keep audiences engaged. If you’re not a native German speaker, it’s unlikely you have the voice talent of a professional German voiceover artist.

Of course, some people can pick up German faster than others. For instance, Norwegian and Danish speakers might find it easier to deliver a believable standard German accent. The same applies to people from Austria, Switzerland, and other Nordic countries with Germanic influences in the language.

That said, a voice actor might still be necessary, especially when aiming to create high-quality content. A believable male or female voice is required to make the script easy to follow and understand.

Use text to speech software

Text to speech technology offers an exciting and cheaper alternative to voice actor recordings and voiceovers. A text to speech (TTS) reader uses assistive technology to read text aloud. It can generate narrations using complex artificial intelligence algorithms based on words, grammar rules, and punctuation.

TTS software can understand complex sentence structures, differentiate between visual elements like ads, and read text back to the user. What makes text to speech software even better is the audio quality. This technology gets better every year, generating more humanlike voices, accurate pronunciations, and even different accents and dialects.

Some text to speech apps support dozens of languages and generate hundreds of natural-sounding voices. Creating a compelling voiceover using a TTS reader is easier than ever, especially when you use the right tool.

Speechify—The TTS app you can use for German voiceovers

If you want to create a German voiceover without actors, Speechify can help. Its machine learning algorithms and AI-powered speech synthesis can turn written words into speech for various applications.. The TTS reader supports multiple file formats for you to input scripts, from Word documents to PDF files to JPEGs. You can export the audio in either WAV or MP3 formats.

Furthermore, Speechify enables text highlighting and playback control. It lets users tweak the voiceover until completely satisfied with the result. It also has OCR technology and can read locked text from images, which makes it even better for commercial applications.

Speechify is an all-in-one solution with support for many languages including German, Czech, Korean, Portuguese, English, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Austrian, Hungarian, and more. Try Speechify and try out hundreds of AI natural-sounding voices to create your dream voiceover.

FAQ

What is the German word for speech?

Speech has similar spelling and writing in German. The word “sprache” is the German translation of “speech.”

What language is Hallo Wie geht’s dir?

“Hallo Wie geht’s dir?” is a common German phrase that translates into “Hello, how are you?” in English.

What does bruke mean in German?

“Bruke” is the German word for bridge.

What is the direct translation of voiceover in German?

The direct translation of voiceover is “begleitkommentar.”