Arabic Voiceovers

Which Arabic, and why it is the whole decision

Arabic is the language where the wrong casting call is most obvious to the audience and most invisible to the client. The reason is diglossia: the formal written language and the language people actually speak are genuinely different, and no other major market works this way.

Modern Standard Arabic is the register of news, formal narration and pan-regional broadcast. It is understood everywhere from Morocco to Oman, and nobody speaks it at home. Cast MSA for a consumer advert and you get something that sounds correct, authoritative and slightly cold, like a newsreader selling shampoo.

Modern Standard Arabic, and when it is right

MSA is the correct answer more often than people expect. Use it for corporate and institutional content, for elearning and compliance, for documentary narration, and for any campaign that has to run across the whole region on one budget. It carries authority and it offends nobody.

It is the wrong answer when the job is to feel like the audience. Consumer advertising, anything aimed at a younger audience, and anything trading on warmth or humour usually needs a dialect.

The dialects that get cast

• Egyptian, the most widely understood dialect in the region because of decades of Egyptian film and television. The default when one dialect has to stand in for many.
• Gulf, for Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the wider GCC, and the register most premium and financial brands use there.
• Levantine, covering Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine, and widely perceived as warm and contemporary.
• Iraqi, distinct enough to need its own casting for that market.
• Maghrebi, for Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, and genuinely hard for eastern Arab audiences to follow. Do not use it as a regional stand-in.

The Maghrebi point is the one that catches people. A Moroccan read does not work as pan-Arab content, and an Egyptian read does not fully land in Casablanca. If the campaign covers both, that is two recordings, not one.

Arabic runs longer, and the layout runs the other way

Translated from English, Arabic typically expands by 20 to 25 percent, so a fixed duration has to be solved in the script rather than by reading faster. Where the length cannot move, the work is adaptation, not translation.

Arabic is also written right to left, which does not affect the voice but breaks the graphics. Layout direction flips, and designs built left to right need reconstructing rather than mirroring. If the project has on-screen text, plan that under localisation before the original is finished, not in launch week.

Numbers, brands and foreign words

Product names, English loanwords and figures are where Arabic reads go wrong in ways nobody catches without a native check. The same brand name is pronounced differently in Gulf and Egyptian. Numbers can be read in more than one way. A term left in English sounds natural to some audiences and lazy to others. We settle these at script stage and mark them on the page the actor reads from.

Where Arabic voice over is used

• Commercial voice over for broadcast, online and connected TV
• Corporate voice over and elearning voice over, both usually MSA
• Explainer voice over for product and onboarding video
• Documentary voice over, the classic MSA format
• Animation voice over and video game voice over, where dialect is usually the right call
• IVR voice over and telephone voice over
• Dubbing and subtitling for film and series

What you get

• A recommendation on MSA or dialect, with the reasoning behind it
• Custom demos from native voices in that register, read to your script
• Pronunciation decided for brand names, numbers and loanwords before the session
• A native reviewer checking the delivered audio
• A fixed quote covering recording, direction, editing and usage

Send the script and tell us which markets it is for. Demos and a fixed quote usually within 24 hours. If you also need the English version, see hiring voice over talent.