Dubbing artists carries the convention of emphases, as discussed above in section 5.1, into daily linguistic activity and believe it is the only way (and the only level of the way) to achieve emphatic function. This causes the discrepancy between dubbing performance and daily speech, as described in the previous chapter. The attitude is a legacy from earlier years when the authority was promoting Guoyu. Only dubbing artists and radio announcers embracing the idea of “standard national language” could have a career in the media, which was then controlled by the government. In today’s circumstance, however, with the governmental control gradually loosening up16, the idea of a standard way of speaking appears more and more as a myth that is unfit.
Indeed, a wide proportion in training programmes today is dedicated to the aspects described in section 5.1, besides performance-related skills such as voice changing, emotion and genre-specific knowledge. Perhaps such a heavy focus indicates to a certain degree the fact that dubbing performance is based on a speaking style that is rather unfamiliar to at least younger generation in Taiwan.
When recording, there is even a majority of younger dubbing artists I know who speak differently than they usually would. A colleague of mine once spoke to recording engineer with her “dubbing mode” off, and was then reproached by a senior dubbing artist, who said “Quit faking that Taiwanese accent, it’s not funny and will yield bad influence to the way you speak”, while my colleague was merely speaking as she normally does. On the contrary, senior dubbing artists tend to speak
16 See Chen (1998) for a detailed description of the situation.
in the same way in both recording session and daily life. This example shows that even dubbing artists themselves, especially younger ones, may have to face the phonetic differences describe in the previous chapter, switching constantly between
"two different modes of speaking. The phenomenon itself is not that uncommon in general linguistic activity, but it is again the older generation’s attitude behind the requirement that represents the particular ideology of the generation, whose members mostly hold a prescriptive view of language. Such a prescriptive view allows them to believe there is a transcendentally correct way of speaking disregarding how language changes. They also publish on social media the ideas promoting such a way of speaking. The following part of this section collects some representative social media entries or interviews to give a brief review of the general ideology. The names of all personnel are again hidden.
(37)
(37) is a typical complaint that younger people do not speak “standard”
Mandarin. The author of this entry specifically points out that they are disappointed in the fact that the distinction between coda position /n/ and /ŋ/ is lost. They also accuse ministry of education of not doing its job and media personnel of forgetting their social responsibility. The entry, in addition to demonstrating the prescriptive view of the author, has a moral overtone in relating to the responsibility of media
workers in the society. Indeed, the trainees are sometimes reminded that, especially in shows for children, it is extremely important to use the correct pronunciation so that the children watching the shows can learn to speak “correctly”. Apparently the attempt has been failing, for as previously cited studies and chapter 4 of this study point out, Taiwan Mandarin is still heavily influenced by Southern Min (Fon & Chiang, 1999; Chung, 2006; Wang & Fong, 2013), daily speech differ greatly from Guoyu pronunciation (Kubler, 1985; Li, 1985), and considerable amount of audience is not fond of dubbed shows anyway (Ishii et al., 1999).
(38)
In (38), the author more openly criticises the so-called Taiwan-Guoyu (‘Taiwan-style national language’), which is a term used for Mandarin with heavy Taiwanese accent. Interestingly, they sound entirely descriptive throughout the first half of the whole entry, saying that Taiwan has developed a unique language that is different from local dialects and Mandarin spoken in earlier days, and has separate versions of pronunciation when written and spoken, and has no neutral tone, nor
retroflex sounds, nor the distinction between coda position [n] and [ŋ] and between [n] and [l], [r] and [l]. Eventually they point out that the speakers of “standard”
Mandarin are so rare that they wonder if they could be protected due to their endangered state. They also comment in their own post asking those who are in favour of what they write to share the entry on social media so that the entry could hopefully reach the “authority”, who could potentially do something about the
“negative” influence.
This entry shows that they are fully aware of many phonetic changes happening in the language and also are aware it is a unique version of pronunciation system in Taiwan, yet they judge the changes to be harmful and believe it is something to be dealt with by the authority. Also noteworthy is another user that writes with erhua in the comment in favour of the entry. Erhua is a suffixation of [ɚ] which is commonly seen in Beijing Mandarin (Lee, 2005) but relatively rare in Taiwan Mandarin.
(39)
(39) Criticises not only pronunciation but also the syntax in the language of younger generation. The subject of discussion in the entry is transcribed below as (40).
(40) 雖然 我 很愛 我女朋友 suiran wo henai wonvpengyou although I love very much my girlfriend
可是 住 太遠 了 keshi zhu taiyuan le
but live too far particle
‘although I love my girlfriend a lot, we live too far away from each other’
In (39), the author is mainly dissatisfied with “too much omittance” in (40), where subject of ‘live too far away from each other’ is omitted. Pronoun drop is a phenomenon not uncommon in Mandarin (Huang, 1989), but the author regards it more as an evidence of speakers being linguistically immature and unorthodox. They also complain that there should be a pragmatic implication of the utterance, in this case the underlined part of “Although I love my girlfriend a lot, we live too far away from each other and it’s been difficult to meet up. Dating her is kind of tough.” The author of this entry believes such implication should be spoken explicitly to enhance the clarity of utterance. Finally, the author ironically points out that young people have one way to clarify the sentence, which is merely the filler duia (‘that’s correct’).
However they again point out that the filler is not pronounced properly, namely with vowel reduction. The entry claims to cite linguistic study with no specific reference given, and moreover, overlooks the fact that dui (‘correct’), an abbreviated form of duia, is a filler which has actual discourse functions, as Yang (2007) points out. This
entry is originally by an author in Taiwan and shared by a senior dubbing artist who clearly shares the same value on language.
It should be noted that they have in turn practical justifications for their seemingly arbitrary ideology. (41) and (42) are two examples.
(41)
The author of (41) points out that it is difficult to understand the speech of TV reporters merely by listening to them, without other visual input. They then conclude in the comment that it is a failure in language education. Another user added that it is also difficult to understand the written titles, implying a general low language proficiency of media workers17. As discussed above, this idea could originate from the older times when there was a greater degree of illiteracy. Another possible reason for the requirement is simply that it if one could understand the news report by simply
17 Interestingly, their comment is full of pro-drop, so they themselves would very likely be reproached by the author of (39) for having “low language proficiency”.
listening to it, one would have more flexibility in engaging in other tasks.
(42)
(42) is an interview where the interviewed dubbing artist holds the view that speech with yiyang-duncuo (as explained in Chapter 4, greater pitch and duration variation) is naturally more pleasant because it carries emotion. They believe it is important not only for the dubbing artists but also everyone to learn to “use one’s voice”, which will make the world a better place. When put in this way, the idea is not only functional but also moral. When elevated to a moral level, the idea will be firmly held by the senior dubbing artists as unfalsifiable and delivered to the trainee in training programmes.
As mentioned above, senior dubbing artists mostly exhibit no distinction in how they speak in recording session and how they speak in daily life. Such a unification is reflected by the fact that they wholeheartedly embrace the “standard” language they
recognise, believing such a version of the language indeed functions better, rather than prescribe an authoritative version of language simply out of malice against the younger generation. There are historical and practical reasons behind their sense of superiority, which justifies them to continue to promote “standard national language” despite its being unfavoured by the audience and alienated from natural speech, as shown in the previous two chapters.
Chapter 6
Conclusion
This chapter divides the conclusive remarks of this study in 3 parts. Section 6.1 summarises the answers to the research questions and significance of this study.
Section 6.2 connects the findings and points out that a contributing factor of audience’ rejection against dubbing as unnatural is actually political. Section 6.3 further discusses the final implication of the study, namely whether if there could be a stylistic alternative that would make dubbing more “natural”.