Ukrainian voice over agency

Ukrainian is the sole state language of Ukraine, spoken natively by around 32 million people, with an established diaspora across Poland, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States that keeps the language alive well beyond its borders.

It shares roots with Belarusian and Russian, but Ukrainian has its own grammar, vocabulary and sound. A standard literary register is used in news, education and corporate content, while regional and spoken varieties carry the warmth and rhythm of daily life.

We record Ukrainian for international brands, broadcasters, NGOs and humanitarian communications reaching Ukraine and its diaspora. A native Ukrainian voice, never a repurposed Russian one, signals that a brand understands the market. At GoLocalise, we work with professional Ukrainian voice actors who record in approved studios and stay on top of every step, from script review and casting through to editing and final delivery.

Ukrainian and Russian are separate languages, and since 2022 the choice between them is not a linguistic one. A great many Ukrainians understand Russian, which is why briefs sometimes ask whether one recording could cover both audiences. It could be understood — and it would be heard as a statement. For anything customer-facing, institutional or humanitarian aimed at Ukraine, the language is Ukrainian, and the decision is not ours to soften. If you also need Russian for a separate market, we record it separately and label it clearly.

The alphabets are not identical either. Ukrainian Cyrillic has letters Russian does not use at all — і, ї, є and ґ — and pronounces several shared letters differently. Systems and fonts configured for Russian mangle them, which turns up as missing glyphs in subtitles and on-screen text rather than in the audio. It is worth confirming the encoding and the font before delivery rather than after, and we will check it as part of the job.

Then there is surzhyk, the mixed Ukrainian-Russian speech common in everyday conversation in parts of the country. It is what a lot of people actually speak, and it is almost never what you want in a recording: for broadcast, public information and corporate work the expectation is clean standard Ukrainian. A voice actor who slips into surzhyk under pressure is a real risk with talent sourced cheaply, and it is one of the things we screen for.

Ukrainian also has a vocative case, used when addressing someone directly, which Russian has largely lost. Names change form when you speak to the person rather than about them. Scripts translated by someone working from Russian habits get this wrong, and it reads as careless in exactly the moment — direct address — where you were trying to sound personal.

And the audience has moved. Since 2022 there are large Ukrainian communities across Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, the UK and beyond, and content aimed at them is not the same brief as content aimed at Kyiv: the references differ, the practical needs differ, and often the content needs to work for people who are dealing with a host country's systems. Tell us where the audience actually is.

Send us the script and we will read it before you commit to anything. That review is free: we will confirm the encoding, flag anything that reads as translated from Russian rather than written in Ukrainian, and tell you where the vocative belongs. Then you get an itemised quote and a free casting — shortlisted Ukrainian voices auditioned against your own material, not a demo reel. [Request an Ukrainian voice over quote](/get-a-quote?help=Ukrainian%20voice%20over), or just ask us what the job involves.