One thing to consider is rights and costs to dubbing. Since the base track is a mixed blend, and the international version would be subbed instead of dubbed, the choice of which tracks to use really becomes arbitrary. Or maybe you can re-record everything in Mandarin and just have Zhang Wei reprise her lines. In this case, you can edit Zhang Wei’s lines for the Cantonese version and then edit everyone else’s for Mandarin. In the hectic and low-budget industry, this method was faster and more cost-efficient than recording live sound, particularly when using performers from different dialect regions it also helped facilitate dubbing into other languages for the vital export market (for example, Standard Mandarin for mainland China and Taiwan).īy the time of Shaolin Soccer, studios were recording sound along with video, but this older practice meant that productions could use non-Cantonese speaking talent and simply edit over them. As the Wikipedia article on HK cinema states:įor decades, films were typically shot silent, with dialogue and all other sound dubbed afterwards. Hong Kong cinema has produced dubs in Mandarin for a long time, including with famous movies by the Shaw Bros Studio (they did a lot of cool martial arts stuff and collaborated on Kill Bill).
I worked in video game localization and did some research in localization studies. I’m definitely not an expert but can maybe offer a starting point. The love interest kneads dough for a rundown bakery and is also presented as poor, and as far as I can tell she speaks exclusively Mandarin (everyone seems to understand her though). Mostly all the characters are low status/income, with the main character being presented as a bum/bum-adjacent (he's bilingual Cantonese/Mandarin). It's set in modern day (or at least at the time of release, so circa 2001) Hong Kong, in the rundown/slummy parts. Now I'm wondering though, why did they choose to have the love interest be Mandarin-speaking? Is it supposed to convey something about the character, that mainly a HK-based audience would pick up on? Is it totally unrelated to the direction of the movie, and maybe the actress just can't speak Cantonese?Įdit: Just to add some context, as some of you probably haven't seen the movie. If you can't hear the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin and watched the movie with subs, you'd never realise, or at least you wouldn't have to. I never noticed it when I watched the movie as a kid, and it really doesn't impact the story at all.
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