BARCELONA, Spain, Jan. 30 (UPI) -- The recent premiere of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" in Catalonia has brought about an old dispute: Should movies be dubbed, and at what price?

This is a sector that generates hundreds of millions of dollars, but has nothing to do with free market laws.

Warner Sogefilms, the distributor of Harry Potter -- which belongs to the AOL-Time Warner group -- decided not to show the film in Catalan because, it said, there was not enough time to dub it. This move caused an outcry; soon there were calls to boycott the movie and jam the company's Web page. The Harry Potter hiccup made Warner Sogefilms issue a news release in which it promised that it would show seven copies in English with subtitles in the local dialect of Catalan, compared with 70 copies dubbed in Spanish.

Four million of the region's 6 million people speak Catalan, but the majority also understands and speaks Spanish. According to local papers, however, only 5 percent of Catalonians choose to watch pictures in their original versions.

Warner Sogefilms also agreed to show the dubbed Harry Potter sequel to Catalan next December. Around 200,000 copies of J. K. Rowling's books have been sold in Catalonia.

However, the release of the first part of "The Lord of the Rings" went unnoticed in terms of linguistic disputes. In Catalonia the distributor showed 82 copies dubbed in Spanish and 12 dubbed in Catalan, attracting 186,000 and 17,546 spectators respectively.

The Catalonian government has tried to make Catalan compulsory in the movies for some time. However, the courts in 1999 reversed a governmental decree that had allowed authorities to fine distributors that did not dub their movies to Catalan and Catalonian authorities have been criticized for expending too much money promoting the language.

The Teatre Nacional, for example, paid around $8 million to finance Catalan version of Windows 98, which was not available in that language, and the government heavily subsidizes movies for children dubbed in Catalan.

The Catalonian government seems to expect that production companies will lose money dubbing films to Catalan; these versions are not as popular as the ones in Spanish, even within the Catalonian region. In response, distributors have threatened to stop showing movies in Catalonia if they are forced to lose money by dubbing them to Catalan.

Although the majority of Spaniards prefer to watch movies in their own language, lately more and more people are in favor of original versions. "It is quite ironic that, in Franco's times, Catalonians had to go to Perpignan (France) in order to watch Emmanuelle; and but now, under (Catalonian Premier) Jordi Pujol's empire, they must go to Madrid in order to watch Tom Hanks," Catalonian writer Terenci Moix said recently.

But the resurgence of original versions would mean destroying a formerly profitable business: dubbing.

In Spain many actors work as "dubbers." The first dubbing studio in Spain -- Estudios Trilla-La Riva -- was set up in Barcelona in 1933. After the Civil War in 1939 the Francoist regime enacted a decree that made films in foreign languages illegal, creating a long tradition of Spanish dubbers that are among the best in the world

In 1970 there were 80 registered dubbers. Ten years later, thanks to the television and video boom, that number had doubled, according to Atril, an association of dubbers. The dubbing studios in Barcelona earned a gross income of $2 million in 1982; but five years later, the turnover was $20 million, Atril said.

With the arrival of the autonomic regions, Valencia, Andalusia, Galicia and the Basque Country became new dubbing centers with more competitive prices.

Then the industry took a number of hits, stemming from several developments. The emergence of Latin American soap operas, which need no dubbing; the decision of the video distributors only to release previously dubbed films; the creation of regional television channels that produced their own shows and the accumulation of dubbed movies all set off a kind of crisis for the dubbing industry.

In 1994, dubbing studios in Barcelona earned $10 million, but dubbing prices rose until Spain was the second most expensive country in the European Union to dub a movie. Dubbing a movie in Spain can cost around $63,000.

Despite these recent difficulties, however, as long dubbing remains part of the language policy of the autonomous governments in Spain and Spaniards keep lazy ears for foreign languages, this business is not at risk of disappearing.