Pashto voice over services

It depends which country you mean, and that is the question worth asking first. For an audience inside Afghanistan, yes — budget for Dari as well, because no single official language reaches everyone there. For Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or northern Balochistan, Pashto stands on its own and the language you would pair it with is Urdu, not Dari. Tell us the territory and we will tell you which list you actually need.

No, and this is a common and costly assumption. Pashto is an Eastern Iranian language — the same broad family as Persian but a separate branch — with its own grammar and sounds, including letters that neither Persian nor Arabic uses. A Dari or Farsi speaker cannot cover Pashto, and we do not cast across the two.

Yes. The south-western variety spoken around Kandahar and the north-eastern variety spoken around Peshawar differ audibly — the language names itself Pashto in one and Pakhto in the other. Tell us which market the content is for and we shortlist accordingly; for cross-border content we will advise on which read travels better.

Yes, and the thing to be aware of is that Pashto has no single settled orthography — Afghan and Pakistani conventions differ on spelling and on which loanwords are acceptable. We assign a linguist from the side of the border you are addressing, and for health or safety content we run a terminology pass first, because a term the audience does not recognise is a term the audience ignores.

Pashto adds letters that neither Persian nor Arabic uses — the eight consonants ټ, ډ, ړ, ڼ, ښ, ږ, څ and ځ, plus the two final yehs, ې and ۍ. A great many Arabic web fonts simply do not carry them, so those glyphs fall back to a substitute face and the caption line visibly changes weight halfway through a word. We check the font carries the full Pashto set before anything is burned in, and we build the caption layout right-to-left from the start instead of mirroring a finished English one.

Plain and clear rather than polished. Much Pashto work is public-information material people are meant to act on, and in that context an authoritative but unhurried read does more than broadcast gloss. We direct for that, and we will say so if a script is pitched more formally than its audience needs.

Polio and routine-immunisation campaigns, mine-risk and flood-response messaging, agricultural extension, girls' education and adult literacy programming, cross-border radio, and corporate material for organisations working in Afghanistan and north-west Pakistan.

Short pieces normally come back inside a working day once casting is signed off. Long-form, multi-voice or anything needing a terminology pass is scheduled by your project manager against a date we put in writing before recording starts.

Your Pashto audio is delivered to your specification: uncompressed WAV, MP3 where size matters, stems where the mix happens elsewhere, at the LUFS target you set.

Less than people expect: the script, or the draft of it, its total running time or word count, where the recording will be used, and the date you need it by. If the script is not signed off yet, send the draft anyway — we would rather quote on what exists than wait for a version that eats your deadline. A named project manager comes back with an itemised quote, normally within four working hours.

More than half of enquiries get a reply within thirty minutes during office hours (Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm UK time), and the itemised quote normally follows within four working hours. After that you have one dedicated project manager who owns the job from brief to final file — not a ticket queue, and not a different name on every email. If it is easier, call +44 207 095 5730 and ask for them by name.

Yes, and it is one of the commonest reasons people get in touch. Tell us it is for a pitch and you get a figure you can put in front of your own client, itemised so it stands up to being picked apart, with no obligation and no follow-up sales calls if the pitch goes elsewhere. If it lands, the quote still holds and we already know the project.