The Arabic lyrics to “Let It Go” are as forbidding as Elsa’s ice palace. The Egyptian singer Nesma Mahgoub, in the song’s chorus, sings, “Discharge thy secret! I shall not bear the torment!” and “I dread not all that shall be said! Discharge the storm clouds! The snow instigateth not lugubriosity within me…” From one song to the next, there isn’t a declensional ending dropped or an antique expression avoided, whether it is sung by a dancing snowman or a choir of forest trolls. The Arabic of “Frozen” is frozen in time, as “localized” to contemporary Middle Eastern youth culture as Latin quatrains in French rap.Indeed, he notes that earlier Disney products were dubbed in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic, widely understood due to Egyptian films, and much less formal sounding.
Why Disney decided to abandon dialectal Arabic for “Frozen” is perplexing, and the reaction has been mixed. Many YouTube viewers are annoyed, with some fans recording their own versions of the songs in dialect. An online petition has called for Disney to switch its dubbing back to Egyptian Arabic, plaintively wondering, “How can we watch ‘Monsters University’ in the Heavy Modern Arabic while we saw the first one in Egyptian accent that everybody loved…?”It;s a good question, and apparently many are complaining. The movie will draw lots of kids, being a Disney product, many of whom have only begun to study Modern Standard Arabic in school, so I suspect there is a constituency. (Though of course there's a certain irony in the fact that Elias' nom de blog, Qifa Nabki, alludes to the opening words of the most famous poem in pre-Islamic Classical Arabic.)
How indeed? Or perhaps the real question is: Why? Why is Disney willing to commission separate translations of its films for speakers of Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish, European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, European French and Canadian French, but is moving in the opposite direction when it comes to Arabic? The answer cannot be that the dialect markets are too small. The population of all of Scandinavia is less than a third of Egypt’s, but is represented by five different translations of “Frozen.” There are nearly ten times as many Moroccans living in Casablanca alone as there are Icelanders in the whole world. The markets are there. What is missing is a constituency for cultural production in dialectal Arabic.
The links in the first paragraph above go to various examples on YouTube, but for convenience, here's the megahit "Let it Go," in a formal language no one would actually speak naturally:
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6 comments:
I'd be rather impressed by an Algerian-dialect dubbing of "Frozen", but that isn't likely to happen any time soon. And given the choice between watching it in Standard Arabic (a language which Algerian kids do eventually study and use) and Egyptian Arabic (which they don't), I'd certainly pick Standard Arabic. It's not as though Algerian kids understand Egyptian, whereas they're already used to watching cartoons in Standard Arabic (that's what all cartoons are in on Algerian TV). Besides, Standard Arabic sounds so much nicer :)
Of course, those aren't the only relevant choices. In the absence of an MSA version, I personally wouldn't pick French over Egyptian Arabic, but I think many Algerian parents would – certainly I don't remember ever seeing these Egyptian Arabic-dubbed versions that Elias Muhanna is talking about in Algeria...
Covert support for democracy in Egypt is my guess.
Anyway, absolute population figures are rather less relevant to Disney's bottom line than the total amount of spare income. In terms of GDP, Scandinavia far outstrips Egypt, and the Gulf is bigger than Egypt and the Maghreb put together (look at this GDP map: http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/display.php?selected=169). So the most relevant question for Disney is which language parents in the Gulf prefer, and I wouldn't be surprised if they, too, prefer Standard to Egyptian.
Lameen: But isn't Algeria something of an outlier? Levantine and in my limited experience Gulf speakers seem to understand if not speak Egyptian. And as Elis notrd, if you can do Iberian and Latin American Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, why not 2 or 3 Arabics?
Lameen: But isn't Algeria something of an outlier? Levantine and in my limited experience Gulf speakers seem to understand if not speak Egyptian. And as Elis notrd, if you can do Iberian and Latin American Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, why not 2 or 3 Arabics?
2 or 3 Arabics would certainly be interesting. I was mainly reacting against the suggestion that shifting from Egyptian to Standard is somehow a step backwards. As long as they're doing only a single Arabic translation, I'd much rather have it in Standard Arabic, which belongs to everyone, than Egyptian, which only belongs to Egypt. Even if they shift to doing several, many people will be excluded if one isn't Standard – they're unlikely to bother with a separate Mauritanian version, for instance...
Algeria is always a special case, but not that special: Moroccan and Tunisian children would have equal trouble with Egyptian, and that already makes a quarter of the Arab world. And judging from the comments on Elias Muhanna's piece, my visceral reaction to the idea of being stuck with only Egyptian dubbing is far from unique.
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