Amharic voice over services

Amharic is the working language of Ethiopia's federal government and a Semitic language — the same family as Arabic and Hebrew, and related to Tigrinya and to liturgical Ge'ez. Most of the work we see in it is NGO, public-health, civic and broadcast content, alongside corporate material for organisations operating in the country.

The first thing to plan for is the script. Amharic is written in Ge'ez, also called fidel — an abugida where each character carries a consonant *and* its vowel, built from 33 base consonants across seven vowel orders. It is not the Latin alphabet with diacritics; it is a different system, and it needs a font and a layout that support it. Here is the part that catches people out: although Amharic is Semitic, it reads left to right. Anyone who has laid out Arabic or Hebrew subtitles arrives expecting right-to-left and builds the wrong template.

The second is more expensive, and almost nobody plans for it. Ethiopia runs its own calendar and its own clock. The calendar has thirteen months and sits roughly seven to eight years behind the Gregorian one. The day is counted from dawn, so what an Ethiopian listener calls three o'clock is nine in the morning to you. A script with dates, deadlines, opening hours or a campaign window is not translated, it is converted — and if that conversion is skipped, the voice over is word-perfect and the information is wrong.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because it decides budgets. Amharic does not cover Ethiopia. It is the federal working language, but Oromo has more native speakers, and Tigrinya serves the north. A campaign recorded only in Amharic reaches a large audience and misses a larger one. Tell us which regions you need and we will be straight with you about what we can cast and what we would have to source.

Typical work is humanitarian and NGO communications, public-health and nutrition campaigns, agricultural and development content, eLearning, government and civic information, broadcast and diaspora media, and corporate material for organisations working in Ethiopia.