Georgian voice over services

Georgian is the official language of Georgia, spoken by around 3.7 million people, and it is unlike anything around it. It belongs to the Kartvelian family — it is not Indo-European, and it is unrelated to Russian, Turkish or Armenian despite sharing a region with all three. There is no neighbouring language that can stand in for it.

It is written in Mkhedruli, an alphabet used for no other major language and one that makes no distinction between upper and lower case. That matters less for a voice over than for on-screen text, but it shapes everything that surrounds the recording: titles, captions and graphics all need handling by someone who reads the script.

For the read itself, the thing that separates a native performance is articulation. Georgian permits consonant clusters that most languages do not, and a non-native speaker either stumbles over them or breaks them up with vowels that are not there. Neither is subtle to a Georgian listener.

The other reason to cast natively is not to cast Russian by accident. Many Georgians speak Russian as a second language, and a Russian-influenced read is immediately audible — and, given the region's history, not neutral. We cast native Georgian speakers, recorded and directed as such.

Demand for Georgian voice over typically comes from film and television production shooting in Georgia, which has become a popular location, along with tourism campaigns, outsourcing and shared-service centres in Tbilisi, e-learning publishers and consumer brands entering the Caucasus market.