On September 27th, Wang Han, Honorary President of the Association of Language Workers in Hunan Province and Vice Chairman of Hunan Television Artists Association, attended the First Forum on Languages Workers of Hunan Province in Hunan Mass Media Vocational and Technical College and exchanged ideas with members of the association and teachers and students attended the meeting.
During the exchanges, Wang Han expressed his point of view about dialect conservation and TV presenters career from several aspects, including the relationship between language and culture communication. Journalists in the Media and News Agency took the following excerpts from the recordings:
Today, I come to Hunan Mass Media Vocational and Technical College. A lot of people present here will be my peers in the future.
I lived in Xiangtan during my childhood. A lot of college students from all over the country, including Hubei, Jiangsu and Shanghai, went there to support the construction of Chairman Mao’s hometown. I was willing to learn their dialects because I was interested in dialects. When I grew up, I became a TV presenter. I was considering how to make the guests more relaxed. Once, when I spoke his dialect, the guest was very relaxed. Then it became a magical weapon to victories. Out of vanity, I thought I should learn harder because people got relaxed when I spoke a few of their dialects.
To my peers in the future, I want to tell you what the career TV presenter is like. Through my experience in this career for more than 20 years, I should be able to talk about some secrets behind it.
A TV presenter (zhu chi ren) can be interpreted from three different dimensions: mind, skills and feelings. So to be a TV presenter, the first thing is to bear something in mind. The second is to be skillful. The skills here may refer to something we learned at school, such as Mandarin. But that is not so important because it is not hard to learn Mandarin well at all.
Speaking many dialects is one of the skills. I even take it as the least important skill. But the first priority is our mind. We must bear certain things in our mind, for example, the Four consciousness, the Four-Pronged Strategy and the Four Confidence (Confidence of the Socialist Path, Confidence of the Socialist System, Confidence of Theories and Confidence of Culture), especially Confidence of Culture.
However, the most important part is “ren” (person). The problem we need to consider at every moment is not whether we are speaking a dialect, but whether we are speaking human language. I asked a lot of young people where they were working. They said they were working in a TV station. When I asked them what was their job, their answer was that he or she worked for presenting. But they forgot they were person. Since we are TV presenters, the focus should be put on “ren”. As a human being, as a person, one should be kind, good and conscious.
I often interview guests from the countryside in my programmes. I never thought about how I should get everything in control. The guests were not skillful at all and they even couldn’t speak Mandarin. But what they said would touch people or make people cry because they were speaking human languages.
Therefore, I think as a TV presenter. We should not pursuit our abilities, the capability to control everything, the skills, the cadenced voice or elegance. Excessively we must bear in mind first that we are person.
