Our Afrikaans subtitling services can help you reach a new audience in South Africa.

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South Africa is a famously linguistically diverse country, with the country’s 11 official languages only constituting less than one third of the total number of languages indigenous to the southern African nation. English is generally used as a lingua franca in the country, with speakers of various languages learning it for governmental matters and media—but Zulu, Xhosa, and Afrikaans all feature more native speakers than English. Even if many Afrikaans speakers can understand English, many also prefer their native Afrikaans—and that’s why including Afrikaans subtitles in your work can be powerful.

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At TranscriptionServices.com, we love helping content creators discover new markets around the world, simultaneously exposing linguistically diverse populations to great new content. That’s why, given the prominence of the language in South Africa, we created our Afrikaans subtitling team. Our Afrikaans subtitling team consists of Afrikaans native speakers who are passionate about their language, and they’re eager to meticulously translate your script into Afrikaans and deliver tailored subtitles in the form of SRT files, an easy and convenient format to add to your video content.

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Our rates for Afrikaans subtitling services are competitive—see for yourself when you request a free quote!

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Afrikaans subtitles are an important way to capture South African viewership.

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Afrikaans is the third-biggest native language in South Africa, with roughly 7 million people, or 13.5%, in the country growing up with Afrikaans as a mother tongue. Given its prominence in South African media, another 10 million or so South Africans speak Afrikaans as a second language. Even more Afrikaans speakers can be found in neighboring countries like Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, resulting in an estimated 23 million worldwide speakers.

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Not all Afrikaans speakers understand the language in its spoken form, however. A portion of the Afrikaans-speaking population is deaf or hard of hearing, and if you opt for Afrikaans dubs, you’re shutting this community out from this potential audience. Implementing Afrikaans subtitles (or closed captions, which we can also provide) accommodates this minority community, and they’ll appreciate your attention and care. Subtitles are also useful for all the Afrikaans speakers who may be watching your video from the bus or another public setting where they can’t turn on the sound.

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Diving into the unique past of Afrikaans

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Most languages develop organically over thousands of years, ebbing with the cultural flow of their speakers. But languages like Afrikaans, which is largely considered a partial creole, are a bit different. Afrikaans formed through the merging of the European Dutch brought to the shores of South Africa by Dutch colonists and a Dutch pidgin that combined elements of Dutch with local African languages. Today’s Afrikaans features grammar and vocabulary generally derived from Dutch, with the two languages enjoying mutual intelligibility, but Afrikaans also has many loanwords from Malay, Portuguese, Bantu languages like Zulu and Xhosa, and Khoisan languages like Khoekhoe.

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Afrikaans is a relatively grammatically simple language, with little inflection on both nouns and verbs. Afrikaans nouns are only inflected in their plural form, with a few different patterns for pluralization found in the language. Otherwise, there are no cases or grammatical gender in Afrikaans. Afrikaans verbs also remain consistent across all grammatical persons, unlike in Dutch, where verbs change form for at least some persons. Another difference between Afrikaans and Dutch is the tendency toward double negation in Afrikaans. Regardless of its apparent simplicity, however, you’ll need a professional Afrikaans subtitler to capture all the subtle nuances of the language.

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Let our Afrikaans subtitling experts help you conquer the South African market.

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Afrikaans plays a vital role in the multilingual country of South Africa, and our Afrikaans subtitling team would like to help you make your movie, game, TV series, documentary, or video a success in this vibrant nation. Doing so is made much easier with our Afrikaans subtitles, which come in the form of SRT files—the industry standard—making them remarkably simple to add to your project. Since many of our subtitlers are also trained in other disciplines, it’s also easy for us to navigate any technical jargon that may crop up in your content.

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With experience working on a wide variety of projects, our Afrikaans subtitling team is uniquely positioned to help you capture the hearts of the South African people. We guarantee quality in our Afrikaans subtitles!

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It’s never been easier to make a splash in South Africa—shoot us a message if you’re ready to work with our Afrikaans subtitlers!