This one’s been sitting in my drafts for a while and I finally decided to tackle it now. When you can’t understand the language while watching, the one thing that really carries out how you understand the dynamics in a series for me is the voices of the actors and what emotion they carry with it. Every time I dig into a new C-drama, I catch myself listening in on the actors play while trying to tackle the speed of the subtitles in English. I am not sure for every other western c-drama lover but for me subtitles are obligatory. The biggest hurdle I have is that sometimes the Chinese language carries so much meaning that English subtitles can’t catch up and are changing way too fast for my taste. My point is, I really love listening to the actors’ voices. Now here is the truth that hit me a while ago as I was researching my drama topics, and I am aware this is a well known fact but pardon my ignorance, I am learning on the go… In many of the Chinese dramas we watch we don’t listen to the actors on the screen. Their roles are dubbed by professional voice actors and this is general practice in the c-drama production that is functioning differently than how dubbing culture works in the West. First I found it strange, then I decided to understand why it is like this. And it turns out quite interesting,actually, so I finally decided to give it a nice spot in my blog.
Here are my own thoughts on this along with the mechanics I managed to grasp, and mind me, there is probably plenty more I haven’t found out about. As this is a live learning curve for myself, I am leaving room for a follow up in the future.
Where this comes from, and why it stuck around
There is a very short understandable thesis for this and you can mostly find it in topic discussions on Reddit along with some coverage in short videos on YouTube and TikTok. Those are mostly answering the initial surface searches of fans looking for an easy explanation. Those usually move on after the most convenient and easy explanation. The answers mostly span post-production efficiency, actor schedules, or experience of the actors. The longer version is much more intriguing, once you actually trace it and of course I did a bit of digging on it.
The development line in the past
Before the mid-2010s, dubbing existed but wasn’t a cover story. Actors trained in 声台形表 (voice-stage-form-performance) at drama academies were expected to be able to carry their own lines. When the choice was for dubbing a particular role, it was based on the lead principle for improving the craft rather than anything else. So choice was made on artistical reasons like better vocal match for a role or smoother post-production rather than cover up inability or rescue a bad voice performance.
Then the “traffic star” (流量明星) system took over, and dubbing quietly became part of the process. Now I think this whole mechanics is a very interesting thing to learn about. My personal observation as a marketer is that it is intriguing to see how a result-oriented apparatus can actually introduce a layer of completely different ways of bringing acting talent into a show mostly because they have excellent money making potential. In the west, when actors become famous it is mostly a story of talent, uniqueness and a combination of chance and hard work. While the mechanics behind the “traffic stars” is actually based on the ROI of a person/idol rather than skills. And here comes the voice acting filling up the talent or training gap.
Productions started casting for fan-base size and social-media heat rather than trained ability, and a meaningful number of those cast couldn’t actually deliver lines on camera. The industry even has a name for the extreme version of this: 数字小姐 (“Digital Miss”), which means an actress who allegedly didn’t memorize dialogue at all, just mouthed numbers (“one-two-three-four…”) in front of the camera while the real line got recorded afterward by someone else entirely. Worth being precise here, because the truth is no actress has ever been conclusively confirmed as a Digital Miss or at least there is no sufficient information for me to uncover as I couldn’t find good coverage in English for it. Several of the names attached to the rumor have denied it outright, so the term now carries the meaning of a general industry insult.
There is however a legitimate example that is not bound to any bias of the actual dubbing and it is a well known actor to western viewers as well. Chow Yun-fat did something similar during a complex fight sequence in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because talking and doing choreography at the same time simply wasn’t practical.
Of course we wouldn’t be talking about it if there wasn’t the opposite reaction later on.
Around early-to-mid 2020s onward, using your own voice turned into a badge. It worked reasonably well for modern-day dramas but when it comes to costume dramas, where classical, literary dialogue is genuinely hard to deliver convincingly, it wasn’t nearly as good. So what we saw is a moderate mindful, in my opinion, bounce back around 2024 as the industry had quietly swung back toward dubbing-as-default even for prestige productions.
Blossom (九重紫): what the norm looks like when nobody’s arguing about it
I wrote about Blossom’s on-set actions and mechanics previously, but the dubbing angle deserves its own mention here. From all the dramas I’ve watched so far, I think it is a clean illustration of just how the dubbing mechanics work if it isn’t affected by any controversy induced by production or fans. The entire cast was dubbed, leads included, and it isn’t an emergency fix. Judging by the fact that there was a Dubbing Director it is a planned decision. Honestly, I watched it and it never occurred to me to ask myself if it is dubbed or not. As I’ve been through the research already I find my own reactions very interesting and I need to share that with everyone.
This is how my brain works on two different performances. I can’t even imagine Brad Pitt being dubbed for “Inglorious Basterds” in the initial scene where he is talking to his crew with that amazing accent of his and a very distinct vocabulary. However, when it comes to Song Mo in Blossom, I actually don’t mind it. It is just two different markets, two different cultures and understanding the distinction is all you need to enjoy and appreciate both.
Pursuit of Jade (逐玉): what happens when the norm gets caught
I keep mentioning this one in my articles but I find this quite normal. Since it is my entry point into c-drama and at the same time there is so much action surrounding it, it is sort of inevitable. This is the case that actually made me start paying attention, as it came up in my research as a case where because it’s a live example of the system working in the opposite direction of what I’ve seen before. What I mean is that initially the promotional trailers for PoJ used Zhang Linghe’s real voice, and there was real anticipation that the broadcast version would sound the same. Well, in the end his character had been a mix of dubbing and his own voice, and the artist is Yi Fan, someone who already worked on other productions of his before.
What is notable here though is that in this case despite the controversy, the studio defended it as a standard artistic call, the dub stayed for the full run, and the show became a record-breaking commercial success anyway. As we know it still continues to break records and became the first mainland Chinese drama in Netflix’s Global Top 10 Non-English list. The controversy didn’t hurt the show. One could easily read this as a sign that it doesn’t matter for the success of the production but I also keep wondering if that is mostly because PoJ is an entry point for many who don’t even know this production mechanics in general.
What’s actually different in the West
The truth is dubbing doesn’t work like this in the West and essentially what you hear is part of the package and the skills of the actor. It is a measure for his/her own influence on the audience and a deeply rooted part of their own personality. I will go back once again to a favourite movie “Inglorious Basterds” and the chilling performance of Christopher Waltz in the scene where he is looking for the hidden people in the house. Can you imagine this one dubbed by anyone? I have to be honest, I can’t.
In the West dubbing just doesn’t work like that. Where dubbing is mostly used is as ADR (automated dialogue replacement) and also for different language markets entry strategy.
ADR (automated dialogue replacement / “looping”) is standard in Hollywood but its purpose is to fix technical problems: bad on-set audio, a plane overhead, a line that needs rewriting after the fact. And what is important is that almost always the same actor re-records their own lines months later. The criteria for good ADR is actually being invisible. There’s no disclosure conversation because there’s barely anything to disclose: it’s the same voice, recorded twice. This isn’t a real analogue to what’s happening in Chinese TV dubbing, because it fails on the one axis the fact that the voice identity of the actor is not swapped.
Cross-market dubbing for particular markets like Italy, Germany, France, Spain, may be considered as the real structural mirror. However in this case nobody watching the Italian dub of a Tom Cruise film is confused about whether that’s really him, we all know he doesn’t speak Italian. What’s fascinating is what Italy built on top of that necessity: a “voce fissa” (fixed voice) system, where the same Italian actor voices the same Hollywood star across an entire career, and the pairing becomes a public, permanent, celebrated identity.
We have a similar practice in Bulgaria as well but as I am also an English speaker I love watching the productions in their native language with subtitles rather than hearing it dubbed. Somehow for me the voices in the movies carry out half of the acting performance. For me, hearing the actor adding his own powerful personality to the role is one of the cleanest forms of their art in a way.
My own intake on all of this
Now, I’ve always been a big supporter of understanding and moderation with no judgment calls especially if I am not living in the actual reality of a situation to know all the reasons behind a decision being made. That is why for me there is no right or wrong call that I should make. However, knowing all of the above, I think it gives me a different form of appreciation on productions from now on.
It is very interesting when you know that dubbing can actually be done like that for chinese series and then whether it is the actors’ voices or not, it just gives you different points to assess.
I think clean understanding will give you an appreciation for the voice actor who actually dubs and in this case a flawless collaboration and role symbiosis between role actor and voice actor makes the best for a production to give to the audience. In the opposite case, when the actor performs with his/her own voice, then we can simply take it all in – voice acting, feeling, voice register and emotional skill.
Just because there are different mechanics behind production doesn’t require a verdict to be given but rather appreciating different dynamics make it all the more fascinating. If there is anything I would do differently though is maybe add a layer of transparency and a touch of educational approach even for the Chinese audiences. I believe if possible and taken as an approach it would largely benefit the removal of controversy, if this is something that needs removing of course.
What I am 100% sure I’ll do for my drama watchlist from now on? I will definitely check the small letters for the voice dubbing actors presence, so I know how to understand the whole production.