Making a Foreign Film Speak Chinese

The Northeast Film Studio’s Chinese-language version of the Soviet film The Ordinary Soldier was completed in May 1949, according to the Jilin provincial gazetteer. The film follows Red Army soldier Matrosov, a subject identified in a later CCTV retrospective. The gazetteer presents it as the first foreign film dubbed in Chinese, while its completion date places the project before 1 October 1949, the founding of the People’s Republic. That chronology locates the work in the postwar studio’s early months.

The gazetteer names Yuan Naichen as dubbing director and Liu Chi and Meng Guangjun as translators. It says the voice performers came from the art troupe of the Northeast Military and Political University. A 2005 CCTV retrospective recalls Yuan scouting voices near the studio: he heard the village head Ma Jingtu over a loudspeaker and recruited him for the team.

In a 2005 retrospective, Yuan recalled that the first translated readings did not finish when the screen character stopped speaking. The team checked the translation against the original and found that sentence length, rather than a simple mistake, created the mismatch. Yuan remembered timing a thirteen-second line with a stopwatch. A literal Chinese rendering could run too long; a rushed one fit the slot but sounded unnatural. The time limit belonged to the moving image, so each sentence had to be adapted for both meaning and spoken duration.

The team had to make the line fit both screen movement and spoken Chinese. A 2020 Changchun Daily retrospective gives one example: Yuan rendered the Russian battle cry Ura as Chinese “chong a” (“charge”), timing and wording it to fit the mouth while sounding natural.