Korean voice over services

Korean is the official language of both South Korea and North Korea, spoken natively by around 80 million people, with established speaking communities across China, Japan, the United States and Central Asia.

Korean is written almost exclusively in Hangul, a script created in the 15th century and built around individual sounds rather than characters. The Seoul dialect is the basis of standard Korean used in broadcasting and corporate media, while regional varieties, most notably the Jeju dialect, carry their own vocabulary and rhythm.

At GoLocalise, we work with professional Korean voice actors who record in approved studios. We stay on top of every step, from script review and casting through to editing and final delivery, to ensure the voice you go out with matches the audience and content you are producing for.

Korean encodes the relationship between speaker and listener in the verb ending, and it is not optional. There are distinct speech levels, and the choice runs through every sentence: the polite formal register used in broadcast and corporate work, the polite informal one that most advertising uses, and the plain form that is either intimate or rude depending on who is speaking to whom. English collapses all of it, so a translated script arrives with the level chosen by whoever typed it. Getting it wrong is not a stylistic wobble — it is a social error the audience registers immediately.

Korean is not related to Chinese or Japanese, whatever the map suggests, and the assumption that talent or terminology transfers between them is the most common procurement mistake in this market. It has its own alphabet, its own grammar and its own sound system. A Japanese or Chinese speaker reading Korean is not an approximation; it is a different language badly read.

Konglish is a real vocabulary rather than a mistake. English loanwords have entered Korean in large numbers and many have shifted meaning along the way, so a term that looks familiar in the script may not mean what an English speaker assumes. Marketing copy is dense with them. We check them at script review rather than letting a mismatch survive into the recording.

Korean word order puts the verb at the end, which changes how a sentence lands. The point of a line arrives last, so timing to picture and cutting for length both behave differently from English — you cannot trim the tail of a Korean sentence without removing the thing it was building towards. It affects subtitling as much as voice, and it is why an unadapted translation so often feels like it is arriving late.

South Korea also has an unusually media-literate audience with high production standards across advertising, broadcast and gaming, and a read that would pass elsewhere is marked as cheap here. For games and animation in particular the casting bar is specific and the expectations are high.

Send us the script and we will tell you which speech level it is in, without a fee, before you commit to anything. It is the fastest way to catch the error that costs a re-record. You get an itemised quote, a check on any Konglish that has drifted, and a free casting of Korean voices recorded on your script rather than a catalogue demo. [Request a Korean voice over quote](/get-a-quote?help=Korean%20voice%20over), or outline the project and we will reply with a shortlist.

Korea changed how it counts ages in 2023, moving officially to the international system after generations of the traditional Korean reckoning in which a newborn is one and everyone gains a year at New Year. Any script that states an age, a year group, an eligibility threshold or a birthday now has to be unambiguous about which system it means, and older material carries the old convention. It is a small thing that produces a factually wrong sentence, and it is worth checking rather than assuming.

Korean content now travels the other way too. Korean drama, film, music and games are exported and localised at scale, so a growing part of the work is Korean source material going into other languages rather than English going into Korean. If that is your direction, tell us — the casting, the timing and the adaptation all work differently when Korean is the original rather than the target, and we handle both.