Dubbed versions of shows have long been commonplace in Europe’s TV marketplace, where shows routinely cross borders — it is a thriving industry with its own award ceremonies, and voice actors are famous in their own right. But in the more insular United States, they have frequently been treated as a joke, thanks to decades of schlocky martial arts films and spaghetti Westerns defined by indifferent voice-casting and terrible lip-syncing.

Netflix, which has perhaps the world’s fastest-growing library of international series and movies, wants badly to change that perception. Over the past nine months, it has been actively recruiting actors and filmmakers to build a production chain it hopes will drastically elevate the quality of its English-language versions of foreign shows, making them seamless enough to win over more American subscribers and, in the process, significantly boost viewing of Netflix’s international offerings.

The streaming giant produces content in more than 30 countries. “Money Heist,” which returns for its third season on Friday, is its most watched non-English show , Netflix said (the company has not released viewership numbers). But the field of popular foreign-language shows is growing. Three recent releases — “How to Sell Drugs Online” (Germany), Season 2 of “The Rain” (Denmark) and “Quicksand” (Sweden) — each garnered “12 to 15 million” global viewers , Ted Sarandos , Netflix’s chief content officer, said this week in a second-quarter earnings discussion posted on the company’s website.

The popular series “Elite,” “Cable Girls” (both from Spain) and “Sacred Games” (India) debut new seasons in August and September. Their global appeal, Sarandos said, “is a shift from what we have seen from the beginning of film and television: that almost all content that travels the world is in English from America.”