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If Spanish politicians have their way, Jennifer Lawrence might one day no longer speak the language.

In a sense, at least. Last week, the actress was all over the Spanish-language press after commenting on the Conan O’Brien show how bizarrely different her characters sounded when dubbed for the Spanish market. Now the dubbing industry itself is under attack from Spain’s Popular Party, which wants to banish dubbed programs from Spanish television schedules and replace them with subtitled content instead. The idea, launched by Spain’s ruling Popular Party as part of its new education plan, is intended to get the nation’s English up to scratch.

Taken as a whole, Spain’s English is at present reasonably good but not excellent. The 2015 EF English Proficiency Index gives Spanish adults a moderate proficiency rating of 56.8 out of 100, which isn’t terrible but places the country far behind fellow EU members such as Sweden and Poland. If Spanish viewers hear more foreign languages in their original form as part of their daily cultural diet, Spain’s education minister reasons, this level of proficiency can only rise. Indeed, subtitles could actually help people further, by allowing them to compare foreign language words with Spanish equivalents.

The long-standing popularity of dubbing has partly historical roots in Spain, where under Franco’s dictatorship all languages other than Castillian were banned. This move was aimed primarily at quashing such languages as Catalan and Basque, but nonetheless meant foreign language films usually needed dubbed dialogue to pass the censors.

Spanish dubbers of Orange Is the New Black had to be quite creative in finding equivalents to U.S. prison slang.

The phenomenon is by no means confined to Spain, however. Europe as a whole is divided between dubbers and subtitlers. The Netherlands, Scandinavia, Portugal, and the Balkans subtitle everything meant for adults, while France, Italy, Spain and the German-speaking countries still tend to dub. This divide can even run across countries; French-speaking Belgians typically listen to dialogue in their own language, while Belgian Dutch-speakers read off subtitles.

The divide arguably has more to do with economics than education. Many nations in the subtitle-loving group have high levels of English comprehension, but their choice to stick with the original language seems to be mainly based on costs. The countries in this group are simply much smaller. Spreading the expense of hiring and recording actors is easy enough for Europe’s 95 million strong German-language market, but less so among, say, five million Norwegians.

Other countries, notably Poland and Russia, use voiceovers as a cheaper alternative. In a method now increasingly being replaced by conventional dubbing, these countries often have a couple of actors reading all the lines, over an original soundtrack that remains still audible beneath. This is cheap but intrusive; it feels strangely as if the speaking actors are peeping toms hiding in a cupboard somewhere on set.

Done carefully, however, proper dubbing can be a real, intricate art. Spanish dubbers of Orange Is the New Black, for example, had to be quite creative in finding equivalents to U.S. prison slang. As script advisor Beatriz Garcia Mayor team told Spain’s Hoy Cinema magazine (the “weapon” in question below is presumably a shiv):

“It’s one thing to know the characters, but what Castillian word would you use to describe the liquor the prisoners make, or the weapons they create?”

Issues like this are less important for subtitles. Designed to be read at speed, they habitually strip dialogue down to its barest form, keeping things lucid but leaving nuances un-translated.

Rising English proficiency is now making original version content more popular across Europe, where subtitled films are starting a long slow march out of the art houses and into the multiplexes. Many English-speaking people illegally stream or download American films and TV to watch—with or without subtitles—rather than wait for the version in their own language. (Hard figures in this area are understandably lacking.)

This is probably no bad thing, suggesting as it does a steady creep of better English skills. It does nonetheless seem a very small pity that, one day, people may no longer be able to watch Hollywood actors wisecracking in fluent Czech.