

In Western Europe after World War II, dubbing was attractive to many film producers as it helped to enable co-production between companies in different countries, in turn allowing them to pool resources and benefit from financial support from multiple governments. First post- WWII movie dub was Konstantin Zaslonov (1949) dubbed from Russian to the Czech language. In post-Nazi Germany, dubbing was used to downplay events in the country's recent past, as in the case of the dub of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, where the Nazi organisation upon which the film's plot centres was changed to a drug smuggling enterprise. In authoritarian states such as Fascist Italy and Francoist Spain, dubbing could be used to enforce particular ideological agendas, excising negative references to the nation and its leaders and promoting standardised national languages at the expense of local dialects and minority languages. In many countries dubbing was adopted, at least in part, for political reasons. In foreign distribution, dubbing is common in theatrically released films, television films, television series, cartoons, and anime.

The process usually takes place on a dub stage. Dubbing, mixing or re-recording, is a post-production process used in filmmaking and video production in which additional or supplementary recordings are lip-synced and "mixed" with original production sound to create the finished soundtrack.
