At a forum, the director of the "Painting Jianghu" animation series was once asked about the overseas performance of Chinese animation. His response: "Not great. The box office of popular domestic animated films in North America accounts for a very small share, and the audience is mostly Chinese." When asked who translated these films or who might do so in the future, none of the directors or producers present could answer. Indeed, while people often compare who did the VFX or post-production, the translator of a film rarely gets much attention.
As domestic films gain momentum, what does it take to bring them overseas? What role does translation of scripts, dialogue, and other text play in this process?
Who Does Film Translation?
Finding out who translated a given film isn't easy. Unless you sit through the entire end credits without skipping a beat, you might never spot the translator's name. And even if you do, the credits are packed and fly by fast. Last year, I saw three films I'd worked on in theaters, but only spotted my name in Sheep Without a Shepherd—because the producer had put our studio's logo in the credits.
Translation quality is critical for a film's overseas release, yet it's arguably the most overlooked part of the entire film industry.
Since 2010, I've worked on dozens of film and TV translations. Out of ten clients who reach out, eight balk at our quote—even though it's the industry standard. A full feature script typically runs 30,000 to 50,000 characters, and a dialogue list around 9,000 to 15,000. Even if we use native English speakers for everything, the combined cost for script and dialogue translation is only 50,000 to 70,000 RMB—less than a crew's daily catering budget. Yet most clients still think it's too expensive.
The same goes for TV series translation. A colleague in the translation industry once asked if we'd take on a script translation for a TV series. Each episode had roughly 8,000 Chinese characters of dialogue, but the client's budget was only 1,000 RMB, and they wanted it done in a single day.
What does it mean to translate 8,000 Chinese characters into English in one day? For quality-focused work, a Chinese-to-English translator typically handles only 2,000 to 3,000 Chinese characters per day. Even our native bilingual translators cap out at 5,000 characters daily. For freelance translators, 1,000 RMB a day is decent pay, and many would take the job. But for the client, hiring a translator who charges under 150 RMB per thousand characters and churns out 8,000 characters a day — how good can the quality really be?
Translation rates in China are notoriously low worldwide. The chaos and price wars across the entire Chinese translation market have led people to believe film translation should also be cheap — even though filmmaking itself is an expensive business. How much does it cost to hire an actor, a VFX team, or run a marketing campaign? Compared to those costs, the translation team gets the smallest slice of the pie.
A Chinese film targeting overseas markets needs to be sold three times: first to distributors, second to juries, and third to audiences. Accordingly, its international rollout requires three types of translation: a synopsis package (including logline and character bios), the full script, and the dialogue list. Poor script translation can kill interest from overseas distributors or investors; bad dialogue translation can seriously hurt award consideration; and shoddy subtitles can ruin the viewing experience for foreign audiences, stifling word-of-mouth. Investing in the right translator for your film is always worth it.
Faithful, Expressive, Elegant — or Just Wishful Thinking?
How do you choose a translator for a film? Who decides if the translation is any good? Many producers’ first instinct is to “find a colleague with good English to oversee it, and aim for something faithful, expressive, and elegant.”
A few years ago, I wrote an article titled “Your ‘Faithful, Expressive, Elegant’ Is Giving Me a Headache,” which racked up nearly a million views online. Some readers loved it; others tracked me down from Zhihu to Weibo to vent. My view hasn’t changed: the “faithful, expressive, elegant” mantra has become a theoretical crutch — or rather, a toxic one — that lets amateurs dictate to professionals. Many people are so influenced by this idea that they insist Chinese-to-English translations must also be “faithful, expressive, and elegant,” even when the original script has no literary pretensions. They want the English to sound “elevated” and “beautifully written,” or they try to render semi-classical Chinese into so-called “classical English” — a term that doesn’t actually exist in the English-speaking world. But the fact is, we Chinese are not native English speakers. What many consider “elegant” often turns out to be grammatically incorrect or idiomatically wrong, sometimes even using the wrong tense (English scripts and synopses are typically narrated in the simple present).
We have to admit that English is not our mother tongue. Without sufficient exposure, our “feel” for the language is often off. That’s why film crews frequently run into a problem: they like to ask so-called “Chinese colleagues with good English” or “overseas Chinese” to evaluate test translations. But these people’s English skills may not be enough to judge the quality of a Chinese-to-English translation, so naturally they can’t pick a good translator either.
Rather than leaving the final call to a local Chinese who thinks their English is good enough, it's better to have a native English speaker read through the translation for grammar and clarity — after all, the end audience is international, not a domestic crowd with varying levels of English proficiency.
What many don't realize is that translation is a specialized skill requiring professional training. Being confident in your English, having studied abroad, or working overseas doesn't qualify you to translate everything — let alone judge the quality of others' work. Good translation demands linguistic talent, systematic study, and real-world practice. Even among those with a BA in English and a master's in translation, a majority still can't handle professional translation work. So what about non-language majors with just a few years of overseas experience? If the client hasn't hired a half-baked translator in the first place, they shouldn't be bringing in just anyone to review the translation quality.
Script Translation: Speed or Quality?
Film crews are often in a rush with translation, so script translation frequently requires teamwork. When my studio translated the first act of The Wandering Earth in the summer of 2016, I led two primary translators to complete over 20,000 characters in seven days. Before that, we read numerous English scripts and briefed the translators on formatting, tense, style, and other basics.
The producer of The Wandering Earth hired multiple translation teams and provided us with a detailed glossary from the start, including character names, locations, and technical terms (like "firestone" and "planet engine"). For Crazy Alien, we were the only external translation team in the early stages. We kept pushing for more time to ensure quality, but the crew's schedule was tight — they wanted the full script done in a week, or script updates turned around in two to three days.
"Rampant Alien" had more versions than any other script I've worked on. While we were handling the Chinese-English translation, the Chinese and American screenwriters on the production side were also constantly revising the script. We spent three to four months translating this script back and forth, and I have nearly a hundred related files on my computer, including every version of the Chinese and English scripts, each translation draft, revision, feedback, and final version. The advantage of team collaboration is speed, but the downside is the difficulty in unifying everyone's style and quality, and the final consolidation takes a lot of time.
The best approach for film translation is still to have one translator handle an entire script from start to finish, as this best ensures consistency in terminology and style. For Chinese-to-English translations, it's ideal to have a native English speaker involved in the translation or revision. Most scripts aren't particularly difficult in terms of language, and often lack literary flair. Compared to novels, the descriptions are simpler, with dialogue and action being the main focus. But the simpler and more everyday the language, the more it tests a translator's skill, as there are no journalistic, academic, or speech clichés to fall back on, leaving no room to mask unidiomatic English.
Handling cultural differences is perhaps the biggest challenge in film translation. In this regard, the translation of "Monkey King: Hero Is Back" had some clever touches worth praising. For example, there's a great rapid-fire Q&A scene between the child Jiangliu'er and the Monkey King. Jiangliu'er asks many questions related to Chinese culture, including "Does the Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King actually have a pagoda?" The Monkey King replies, "No." The scene is meant to showcase the child's humor, but if the line were translated word-for-word, foreign audiences unfamiliar with the "Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King" would find it jarring.
So the translator rephrased the question as: "How did you get your special powers?" The Monkey King replies: "I ate a lot of unique bananas." This approach removes the cultural barrier to understanding and is a perfectly valid strategy.
Writing a script is an act of creation, and translating one is no less an art. It takes time to get it right — time to consider how best to convey information to audiences from different cultural backgrounds.
Why Are Movie Subtitles So Often Wrong?
Based on years of observation, the English subtitles for most Chinese films have at least a few issues.
Take Monkey King: Hero Is Back, for example. One subtitle mistakenly spells "Sifu" (the term consistently used for "master" throughout the film) as "Sigh." On a fast-moving screen, that makes the audience do a double-take.
The problems with Chinese-to-English subtitling aren't always as basic and obvious as the English-to-Chinese blunder of translating "He's back" as "His Back." It's more like listening to a foreigner who's studied Chinese for a few years — you can communicate, with a lot of guessing and gesturing, but it never sounds quite natural.
Alongside the lack of native-speaker involvement leading to unnatural phrasing, another reason English subtitles go wrong is that production teams often don't let translators see the film. The translated script is used directly for the English subtitles, but for security reasons, translators are frequently denied access to the picture. Without the visual context, the quality of the subtitle work inevitably suffers.
This is often a security measure dictated by the production's confidentiality needs. Since translators — especially foreign translators and reviewers — are usually based in different cities from the production team, and the team worries that network transfers could lead to leaks, translators often have to work from scripts alone. But a script description can't always answer every question a translator has, and they may not be able to reach the production team in time. If the translation lead lacks the persistence to dig deeper, misunderstandings can lead to errors.
After the bilingual subtitles are added, the film often goes through multiple rounds of editing and revision, which can shift the order of the translated lines in the script. If these changes are made without consulting the translator, it can result in mistranslations or misaligned subtitles. But compared to visual continuity errors, most domestic productions and audiences don't pay much attention to the quality of English subtitles. If a film doesn't perform well overseas, feedback from foreign audiences on the translation may never reach the team. The limited international success of Chinese films is partly tied to translation quality. Foreign viewers already face cultural differences and barriers when watching Chinese films — poor translations only make it harder for them to understand.
So film and TV translation can't be overlooked. It's a key medium for better overseas distribution. If handled carelessly, it undermines the entire distribution effort. It deserves its own budget, just like VFX, editing, and sound.