Have you ever thought about what goes into making a cartoon? Or maybe there is a famous cartoon from another country you like to watch in Chinese? But how do you change the language to Chinese? This is something called dubbing (配音). To dub means adding sounds or words in a new language to a movie, radio or TV show. Dubbing is usually done to make it easier for people in another country to understand a movie or a show.
For me, I’ve had experience dubbing TV shows and cartoons from Chinese into English. I’ve done dubbing for many kinds of shows, such as love stories, kung fu movies, documentaries (纪录片) and more. However, my favourite ones to dub are cartoons. That’s because with cartoons I can use many different kinds of voices, such as high ones for good guys and low ones for bad guys.
Two of my favourite cartoons that I’ve dubbed were called A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix (《百鸟朝凤》) and The Foolish Old Man Who Removes the Mountains (《愚公移山》). In the first cartoon, I got to play a silly and very proud but well-meaning blackbird. In the second cartoon, I played both the main hero named Qingfeng and the main bad guy named Mountain Spirit Zheng. The hardest part was not reading the written words. But it was acting out (将……演出来) the voices while matching the actions at the same time. Still, it was really fun voicing all of these different roles!
If you enjoy making different voices, then I highly suggest that you try dubbing at least once.