Kept Out in the Cold — بارد جدا

About a month ago Disney released its latest animated film, Frozen, which became an instant hit and has been praised, especially by feminists, for being one of the most progressive Disney movies ever. My friends and I saw it in theaters here and were instantly taken with it. The music is fantastic, aided by the fact that the cast is full of Broadway stars with amazing voices. The most famous song, Let It Go sung by Idina Menzel (of Wicked fame) has received critical acclaim and was even nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars. I am unashamed to admit that I know all the words and was very excited when I saw this clip of it being sung in 25 different languages. For a group of language nerds who also love Disney this seemed like the greatest thing since learning how to conjugate in the past tense! However we were all very disappointed when we watched it and saw that Arabic had been completely left out of the song. As one of the top ten most commonly spoken languages in the world and whose speakers are located all over the globe it seems like it shouldn’t be hard to find a place for it in those 25 languages. I have nothing against any of the languages in the video but I don’t entirely understand why there are several dialects of both French and Spanish along with some much less commonly spoken European languages like Finnish, Flemish and Serbian. Leaving out such a significant population of the world detracts from the videos all-encompassing, global effect. Unfortunately I don’t know if our language, or singing skills are up to the task of translating and recording our own version but if anyone out there is willing to try I promise it would be much appreciated!