There’s a few ways that you can search for Mandarin language stuff online, and which method is best depends on what exactly you’re looking for. You generally have to do some reconnaissance with the various search terms below and see what each search yields. After a few searches you’ll either be able to find what you’re looking for, or at least know that whatever it is you’re searching for isn’t available in a Chinese version.

First off, when you’re looking for the Chinese language version of something, you should know what it’s called in Chinese. You can search using the native-language name, but you should also find the Chinese name, too.

Wikipedia is great for this, just search for the movie, book, or game and then look for the language options along the left-hand side. If you see 中文 listed you can follow that link and find the Chinese name.

If you can’t find the Chinese name then just perform the searches below using the English, or other language, name of the thing you are looking for and you’ll most likely find the Chinese name that way.

If you’re looking for the Chinese/Mandarin dub of a movie then these are the two terms that are used the most.

The keyword here is 配音 which means ‘dub’ (literally ‘accompanying sound’), all you need to do is prefix it with the language you’d like. Here we’ve used two ways of saying ‘Mandarin Chinese’: 中文（Zhōngwén） is obviously ‘Chinese’, and then 國語（国语 Guóyǔ） means ‘Mandarin’ but in the sense of the ‘national language’). These two terms effectively mean the exact same thing, however, I think the term 國語 is used more by Taiwanese (please comment if you know otherwise).

Using the following terms in Google, or your favourite online video site, you could find the Mandarin dub of a movie:

Another quick tip for finding a Mandarin dub is the ’2audio’ trick. A lot of movies are released in China on Bluray with both the original soundtrack and the Mandarin dub. These are released online as ’2audio’ so you could search for:

For subtitles you can always used Shooter.cn, but failing that search in Google for

While searching you may come across file names with the following appended:

国语中字 means “Mandarin dub with Chinese subtitles”. Likewise you may also see 英语中字 which I’m sure you can guess means “English dub with Chinese subtitles”.

For all other stuff, and as general catchall, the good old ‘Chinese version’ will suffice a lot of the time.

版 here is should for 版本（bǎnběn） which means ‘version’ or ‘edition’.

Searching for the following should help you find what you’re looking for:

Lastly, there are some instances when the content you are looking for what never officially released in Chinese, but was translated and released by fans. Most of the time this specific term applies to games. Since a lot of games aren’t localised and released in China, fans hack the ROMs and change the language themselves.

So you would search for:

In the past I’ve spent many an evening searching for stuff in Chinese without luck, so it’s best to learn as many tricks as possible. If you know of a method that’s not mentioned here please post it below and I’ll keep the article updated as information is added.