Resumen de When the Thief of Bagdad tried to steal the show: The short-lived dubbing of Hollywood films into Arabic in the 1940s
Between 1946 and 1951, U.S. distributors began dubbing a small number of films in Arabic for the North African and Middle Eastern markets. This experiment seems to have been motivated by an economic interest to penetrate those foreign markets and also in response to rising nationalism. Two models of dubbed versions existed at the time: the colonially-imposed French versions and the economically-motivated Persian versions. Battling against the former, and taking inspiration from the latter, U.S. distributors found themselves facing insurmountable political difficulties and eventually abandoned the practice of dubbing in Arabic. This case study foregrounds dubbing as a specific distribution strategy and highlights the political dimensions of this practice.
