Hmm. Yeah, I can see how you might need a bit of help with the English, Romuslus. For one thing, it's a translation, not a traduction.

Maybe I could help. It depends on my schedule, but if you need someone to review the translation, maybe I could spare some of my time.

However, are you sure that there aren't already English subtitles available for it? I wouldn't want to waste time working on something like this if it were already available.

It's interesting that you mention La guerre des boutons, cause I was just talking about it with a friend earlier today. We went to see a classic film from our childhood, called La guerre des tuques (1984), which is heavily inspired by Yves Robert's classic film. It was a 20th anniversary screening and the director was present. Most of the people in the audience were people my age (in their twenties) who remembered the film from their childhood.

I noticed we didn't have a profile for it on BA, and I'm going to have to do something about that. The English title is The Dog who Stopped the War, or sometimes The Great Snowball War. It's a great movie, and a bit of a cult classic in Quebec.

I am fluent in French. In fact, English is my second language, even though I have a university in English and have worked as an editor in English for years. Translation is not something I particularly enjoy, but I've been thinking about making some English subtitles for another French film for a while, since I know a lot of people who would like to see it and don't speak French. That film is Je suis le seigneur du château.

I think writing the dialogue in French is probably the best place to start. That's what I was thinking of doing too for that other movie.

The text might be a bit long to post on the forum. I don't really know how long it will be, but I can give you my e-mail address in a private message if you want to send it to me that way.

I'm not really interested in translating that one. But what I can do is review and edit the text after you've translated it. For that I would need the French and English text in order to do a comparison.

I've got Je suis le seigneur du chateau ...recorded from TV and it does have English subs.

I've got La Guerre des Boutons on DVD but no English subs and would love to get them. I've also got many other french movies without English subs and of course subs would be great.

I've thought of making sets of subs from movies such as Je suis le seigneur du chateau which I could do by coping the subs word for word from the tape but I never get around to it because it would take many hours to do one movie.

...as usual time is the great enemy.

Quote:


Actually, French was the language spoken by all the performers during the shooting of the film. Because they were shooting in extremely cold conditions, they had to have a heated blanket around the camera, powered by a generator. This made a lot of noise and rendered 95% of the dialogue recorded during the actual shoot unusable. So the director, André Melançon, opted to have all the dialogue re-recorded in post-production, by the original actors, in French.

I'm assuming that they later recorded a second version of the dialogue in English, with different actors.

So, yeah, French is the original language, and even if all the dialogue is dubbed, it does sound natural and matches the movement of the lips very closely.

It's possible that they used different actors. (Which movie was that?)

André Mélançon (director of La guerre des tuques) mentioned that his new film, Daniel and the Superdogs (also produced by Rock Demers), had been shot simultaneously in French and English. That means that they shot every scene twice - once in French and once in English. If some of the actors weren't fluently bilingual, it's possible that they used different ones for some of the roles.

Shooting a movie in two different languages must be a lot of work.

That's perfectly understandable romuslus ...  I suspected that it would be far too time consuming.

That's very generous of you, Quantum. Thanks for the offer. Let us know when you have the file ready. I'm sure many here will find it useful.

And welcome to BA.