On December 12, the finals of the 12th National College French Film Dubbing Competition were held online. Five undergraduate students of Grade 2019 from French Department of the College of Foreign Languages, Tong Yinuo, Hou Bingqing, Hu Yuhan, Li Luyu and Yu Xintian, participated as one team in the competition and won the national first prize.
The National College French Film Dubbing Competition is an important competition sponsored by Beijing Foreign Studies University. It aims to emphasize the importance of oral expression in French learning through film dubbing competitions, enhance the interest of language learning, and show the demeanor of contemporary college students. The participating teams this year were from 29 national key universities, including Peking University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Shanghai International Studies University, Zhejiang University, and Sun Yat-Sen University. The competition was fierce.
The competition was divided into two parts: preliminaries and finals. Each of the 29 invited colleges and universities across the country sent one team to participate. Five students from Nankai University have been strictly selected by the French Department to work together and prepare for the competition well-aligned. In the preliminaries, each team must submit a dubbed video for the online preliminary selection according to the regulations. The judges would score from four aspects: movie introduction, contestants’ voice, expressiveness, and synchronization. The top 12 colleges and universities would enter the final.
In the preparation process of the preliminaries, the first and most critical step was material selection. After a lot of work done on searching and trying, the five students finally selected a clip from the distinctive silhouette animation Princes et Princesses. During the preparation, the five students practiced together every afternoon, and with the help of foreign teacher Le Gall Loic, they continued to improve their pronunciation and intonation. With vivid dubbing and interpretation, the team of Nankai University successfully advanced to the final.
There were two first prizes, four second prizes, and six third prizes in the final of the competition. Before the start of the finals, the five students needed to prepare one free-choice clip and three prescribed clips within one week. Although time was tight and tasks were heavy, the students rehearsed every line for long time every day, memorized every line, and carefully weighed and considered the emotions of the characters. With the help of foreign teacher Nicolas Tran, they worked hard to correct every sound and to make creative interpretations of the clips.
In the first round of the final, the team splendidly performed the extract from the animation movie Zootopia, and ranked first with a score of 50.33 by virtue of its excellent performance. In the second round, they played as the first team and drawn by lot the most difficult of the three required film clips: Dix pour cent. There were many characters in the clip, the speed of speech was fast, and there was little room for free play. Even though they were the first to come on the stage, the five students remained calm and completed the second round of the competition. They stood out among the last six teams with a high level of synchronization and strong enthusiasm, and finally won the first prize.
Since 2020, the College of Foreign Languages has held professional competition month, which aims to stimulate students’ interest and enthusiasm in language learning, help grow and cultivate excellent professional academic competition teams, improve the competitiveness of the students in national and regional academic competitions, and promote the development of students. The French Department makes full use of this good system. While consolidating daily teaching, it has successively held French speech competitions and French dictation competitions participated by all the students of the department, which effectively improved the competitiveness of students in national competitions.
