Dub, Dub, Dub

Last week the NY Times ran an article on the government initiative here to dub fifty percent of non European films in Catalan. The stated goal of the pending bill is to help integrate immigrants into the local culture. Cinema owners disagree saying there's no demand and now is not the time given declining attendance. Meanwhile, American producers, who would bare the brunt of the impact, fear the additional cost of having to dub their movies not only in Catalan, but in Basque and Gallego too.

Personally, it seems like a twentieth century debate taking place in the twenty-first century. As the article states, cinemas are quickly going the way of record shops as more and more people choose to watch movies at home either legally or illegally. In order to overcome the objections of US producers, the local government is offering to pay the costs at a time when the region is running an ever growing fiscal deficit. But more importantly, the world is increasingly rewarding multilingualism and the best way to foster language development is not by dubbing entertainment into the local language but by showing it in its original version.

As a person quoted in the article said, there isn't the culture of watching films in original version with subtitles in Spain or Catalunya, however. Almost all content is dubbed whether it's shown in the cinema or on TV, on a Spanish station or a Catalan one. The result is people have little contact with foreign languages beyond what they study in class inhibiting their ability to learn. One only need to look at countries that generally don't dub and countries that do to see the benefits of watching content in the original version as far as the language acquisition abilities of its citizens.

I know during the time I taught English, I was always amazed at how people here could study a language for years and years and did well on grammar exams, yet when it came to produce or comprehend a simple sentence, they acted like they'd never heard it before. Some said it was a genetic defect that caused this discrepancy but at the same time I've met enough Spanish and Catalans who speak English well to know this is simply not true.

Like most things in life, what separates a person who speaks a foreign language and one who doesn't is mindset. It takes a certain openness and willingness to sacrifice immediate comfort for a long-term gain and watching dubbed entertainment runs counter to this. Since Catalan is now the vehicular language in most schools, it seems the question of what language to show movies in shouldn't be about assimilation but about preparation for a global, multilingual world.

So, perhaps instead of requiring fifty percent of all non European movies be dubbed into Catalan, a better bill would've required all movies and television shows, regardless of location, to be shown in their original language with subtitles in Catalan or Spanish depending on the cinema owner or the TV station. Maybe then the next generation won't think there's something genetically wrong with them.