hanghai International Studies University (SISU) recently produced a series of videos to tell the stories of China in multilingual languages in cooperation with People's Daily New Media.

The series of videos is called "CHN". It tells stories from the first-person perspective, with voice-over in various languages and bilingual subtitles. It showcases the image of Chinese civilization to the world through dozens of cultural symbols such as Terra Cotta Warriors, giant panda and Chinese ceramics. 

Upon its release, the video quickly got hundreds of millions of views with being interacted tens of millions of times in several days.

In order to attract people from different language backgrounds, the languages these videos use included English, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Italian, Swahili, Kazakh, Thai, Malay, and Greek.

Except for this series of videos, SISU and People's Daily New Media collaborated on the production of multilingual versions of videos such as "PRC" and "Belt and Road".

Faculty members and students from various departments and majors at SISU cooperated to translate, dub, and edit these videos.

Zhang Ruonan and He Junyuan, two SISU’s second-year students in Broadcasting major, are two members of the production team.  They worked together on tasks such as post-production editing. They were all recommended by the team leader, and also had different personal reasons to undertake the task. Zhang shared with us that one of her seniors had previously participated in the production of similar series of videos, which she greatly admired and respected. He viewed this as a rare opportunity for collaboration and a test of her own professional abilities.

During the production process, they encountered some problems. Zhang mistakenly removed a semicolon in Greek subtitles, and later she realized that it represents a question mark in Greek. Reviewed by foreign language lecturers, the drafts were frequently revised. Zhang often had to revise subtitles and dubbing post-editing.

Unlike Zhang’s difficulties, He took on such a heavy editing task for the first time. In this process, she needed to repeatedly revise subtitles with lecturers and software assistance, while carrying equipment for sudden changes. In addition to this task, she also took on some tasks for other school departments. Due to her strict self-discipline, even minor, non-impactful issues led her to re-export and upload revised content.

Despite encountering some difficulties and challenges during the editing process, they ultimately managed to produce a satisfactory final cut that passed the review.

Once they learned about the release of the multilingual versions of "CHN" online, both Zhang and He felt extremely excited. "That night, I intentionally reopened my closed WeChat and shared these videos. I felt extremely proud," said Zhang.