One gaming promo, ten markets, native energy.

The brief

A leading consumer-audio brand had just wrapped a high-end English web promo for its flagship gaming headset line. The spot was built around a well-known professional gamer, and the brand wanted to take it around the world: the same video, with voice-over and subtitles in ten languages.

The producing team was looking for voice talents who matched the energy and professionalism of the original narration and who were, of course, native speakers of each target language. JBI provided pre-recorded talent samples per language, and the team cast voices that both matched the English narrator and fit each locale culturally.

Ten languages, one film

Chinese (Mandarin), Czech, French (France), German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish (Spain) and Turkish.

What made it difficult

A wide-ranging language set

Ten languages spanning very different linguistic families, from Japanese to Turkish to German. JBI works regularly in all of them and maintains a deep talent pool in each, so casting matched the original narrator across the full set.

Synchronizing voice to picture

Each localized voice had to sync to the picture as tightly as the English. Expertly timed translated scripts meant talents only had to modulate their pace slightly, and every talent watched the video before recording to hold a rhythm consistent with the English cut. The final recordings dropped into the edit cleanly, and each version was then mixed for the nuances of its own language.

The on-screen line

The spot included an on-screen line spoken by the professional gamer. Several options were weighed, including UN-style voice-over. The team chose subtitles: it preserved the original on-screen audio the editor had already timed perfectly, avoided adding a third voice, was cost-effective, and let the gaming audience — many of whom would recognize the speaker — still hear his real voice.

Matching a high-end English original

Native-speaker language directors were tasked with matching the polish of the English production: voice-over that was professional, perfectly timed, accurate, and culturally appropriate across a demanding range of languages.

Consistency across every locale

A single JBI project manager oversaw all the recordings and carried the client's direction and voice brief to talents, directors and QA reviewers in every language.

The result

Ten localized versions of the same promo — a set that holds together as a family while being optimized for each individual locale.