My first evening at work at Xiamen TV Station, before I’d come to know so much about these things, I was given the passages to edit, which I did — they didn’t ask me to record dubbing tracks until a week or two later.
One of the news items was about an initiative by some of the expats to have an annual “Help clean up Xiamen Day”. They started by organising gangs of people to pick up rubbish on part of the beach. So I was given a text, which I was told was a condensed version of the Chinese, as the video edited to the Chinese commentary lasted a given amount and the English had to fit with that. I edited it, one of my colleagues recorded it … and the chap who was putting the English track together with the video, just plonked the two together. When the whole was done, the deputy head of the channel came to give the result the OK before it went down to the transmission centre — they stopped doing that after about 6 months — so we all watched the tape.
That item … the commentary was talking about all the rubbish on the beach while the video showed a group of teenage girls dancing on the beach! It took me over a week to convince my colleagues that they could and had to make sure that the video matched what was being said in the commentary.
That evening, the audience, if any, watched a group of teenage girls being described as rubbish to be cleared up!
