Japanese Voice Over Services

Japanese voice over guide by JBI Studios, Japanese is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and Japanese emigrant communities. The Japanese language is written with a combination of three scripts: Chinese characters called kanji, and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, hiragana and katakana. Latin alphabet or rōmaji, is often used for company names and logos, advertising, and when entering Japanese text into a computer. Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers along with traditional Sino-Japanese.

Although Japanese voice over translation is targeted almost exclusively in Japan, it has target market in other places too. Many elderly people can speak Japanese in Korea, Taiwan, parts of China, and Philippines as result of  Japanese empire-building programs that forced locals to learn. Five percent of Hawaii residents speak Japanese, with Japanese ancestry the largest single ancestry in the state. Japanese emigrants can also be found in Peru, Argentina, Australia, the United States, and the Philippines. 

 

An interesting characteristic of the Japanese language is its broad grammatical system that is used to express formality and politeness. Different forms of speech indicate varying levels in social status—from strangers, children, job status, age, gender, experience, speaking about yourself, speaking about another group of people, and level of familiarity. Polite speech is most commonly used to show a lack of acquaintance—the better you know someone, the more likely you are to address them without polite forms of speech.

 

Dozens of dialects are spoken in Japan. The main distinction in Japanese accents is between Tokyo-type and Kyoto-Osaka-type, though Kyūshū-type dialects form a third, smaller group. Make JBI Studios your Japanese voice studio and project contacts to Japanese voice talents,  Japanese voice over in Los Angeles, California,  America and Japanese voice over worldwide including New York City, New York presence. We are a Japanese voice over agency working with multiple Japanese voice recording studios, talents and service providers located in Japan, Germany, England, France, Canada, Australia, South America and Middle East.

Japan has produced many successful anime television series and films, and with each franchise comes celebrity voice actors and actresses. Japanese voice actors who perform anime voice overs are known as seiyu and many of the most successful seiyu studied the craft at one of Japan’s over 130 voice acting schools. Being a seiyu in Japan is like being a Hollywood actor or actress in the United States. Sometimes seiyu, depending on the characters they play, are even more famous in Japan than many of America’s most recognizable silver screen performers. Many seiyu, like some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, venture outside their primary profession of anime voice over to act, sing, host radio shows, and act as narrators for theatre, video games and radio.

 

Some of the most well-known Japanese voice actors doing anime voice overs include Noriaki Sugiyama, who plays Sasuke Uchiha in “Naruto,” Masakuzu Morita, who plays Ichigo Kurosaki in “Bleach,” Mayumi Tanaka, who plays Monkey D. Luffy in “One Piece,” and Masako Nozawa, who plays Son Goku in “Dragon Ball.”