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Chinese Actor' Dubbing

Dramawatcher

Chinese Actors are pretty good with Face Expressions n stuff.... add to that the music and cinematographic effects of splitting, cutting, editing, timing etc .... chinese dramas become great!

HOWEVER, I think sometimes i find it very hard to judge if a Chinese actor is  a good actor or not! Primarily because all of the dialogue is always dubbed..... which makes a huge difference in terms of acting.... this is not a mime lol ..... how should i put this? GRAVITAS of the scenes are all affected in some manner... not completely lost bcs the face expressions of the actors do manage to alleviate this problem but simply put it can never be enough.

While I understand the problem of having different dialects of mandarin resulting in dubbing so as to reach a wider audience and universal (in this case all of China) acceptance, i think given the hard subtitles in almost all shows (in mandarin), perhaps it is time the Chinese entertainment industry take a stand and move towards having actors' actual voice be heard in the show 

What is your opinion? Feel free to share please.

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CheriLyn

I like voice dubbing? I find that the different accents is more distracting than the dubbing. 

And it's not only different dialects of mandarin. There are a lot of Hong Kong actors that work in the c-entertainment industry and some of them have mediocre mandarin. 

 MatthewS:
move towards having actors' actual voice be heard in the show 

There are some actors that use their own voices. It's just that even then, the actors will dub over himself (if that makes any sense?).
So there's probably other reasons, other than the different dialects, why they dub. Maybe production reasons?

It's understandable why people find it distracting though. But I think a large cause of it is that they're not used to dubbing.
But I pretty much grew up watching a lot of dubbed stuff, and it doesn't bother me the slightest. Maybe this is the case for a lot of the viewers and drama producers in China as well. 


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Bae Gyuri

I personally also like when actors use their voice whenever possible. However, like it was mentioned above, Chinese dramas use a lot of foreign actors in their dramas (HK, Thai, Korean...) and dubbing the drama allows this to take place. While I do prefer hearing their voices, there are some great voice actors as well. I don't mind dubbing usually if it isn't distracting. If it is distracting to the point where it gets in the way of the drama and the voice really does not fit or it isn't well in sync, I find it more bothersome.

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bannie

Well you can obviously watch the version in which it is not dubbed to get a full appreciation of the actors' abilities.  I generally dont watch dubbed anyway unless its all that is available. 

say if ur watching TVB, then the mando dramas are automatically gonna be dubbed.

but if i ever was watching online, i wud watch it in the original language. 


do they do the same with taiwanese minnan? the tw dramas i watched online always preserved the minnanhua that would occasionally appear


kinda like any other drama i tink. jap korean.. even anime..

sub >>> DUB!



and to those dramas that are pure dub (actor just mouths random words). if i can tell. then they obviously did a bad job. 

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usablefiber

It is really annoying and always takes me out of the show. It often breaks the illusion for me especially when a small part character comes in and is so obviously dubbed. Also, the sound is just so clearly non-diegetic and it is frustrating. Hopefully they change this soon. 

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Hal

I started watching Love O2O because of the story plot and the reviews, I couldn't go past the 1st episode, the dubbing was just incredibly bothering sadly. I'll try and watch it again some time later on.

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MyDramaObsession

The little kid voices kill me the most ha ha! But seriously I prefer natural voices with subtitles but an not bothered by watching dubbed if I'm not use to the actors original voice. It's so hard to watch Korean, Thai, Taiwanese, etc actors/actresses with voices that you know don't match. Especially guys who have higher and softer voices but sound low and heavy dubbed. Or girls with lower and heavier voices that sound breathy and helium induced :D I can't imagine what the actors think if they watch themselves. I'd probably die laughing at myself if it was me! 

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cnguyen1031

When I first started watching C-Dramas I couldn't get past the dubbing. It was ridiculously annoying because not only did the voice not seem to fit sometimes, but it really just made things seem less realistic. 

There were even a few shows recently that I couldn't watch at first because of the dubbing (Journey of Flower took me 4 tries to eventually get past the dubbing and watch the whole thing). Honestly I'm super used to it now, but (especially when I watch dramas with people I've seen a lot of dramas for - Zhao Li Ying, Wallace Huo, Tiffany Tang, etc) I will admit that the first few episodes I'll be super weirded out until I get used to the voice for that actor for that show.

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jindreame

I prefer natural voice, but if they have a foreign actor or actress, I think it's okay to dub.

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kardasx

I always prefer original voices + subs. When watching Love O2O (my first chinese drama), It seemed to me that those voices are too childish... but without any comparison I thought that it is probably how chinese people talk. :D In this drama I somehow got used to it. Then I found out what is natural voice of Zheng Shuang and would prefer it more than the dubbing.

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