Documentary.

Subtitling “The Hell of Auschwitz: Maus by Art Spiegelman” from French, German and English into UK English for ARTE

The project

End client: ARTE

Title: The Hell of Auschwitz: Maus by Art Spiegelman

Subject: The story behind Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus”

Language pair: French, German and English into UK English

Volume: 52 minutes

Service: Subtitling using an automated subtitle template

You can watch the documentary with my subtitles
on the ARTE website until April 2025

About the documentary

The documentary explores the story behind Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. Originally published in serial in Raw magazine from 1980, it was released as a complete graphic novel in 1986. It is based on Spiegelman’s conversations with his Polish Jewish father about his experience at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. It powerfully depicts Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats.

As a European cultural channel, ARTE’s documentaries are often multilingual with dialogue or narration in French, German and English. This documentary compiles archive interviews with Spiegelman speaking English, interviews with French and German historians, writers, and graphic novel researchers, and French narration by the filmmaker.

Luckily, I work with all three languages, so my client could go to one linguist to subtitle the entire documentary. For the interviews in English, my client wanted a transcription of the dialogue in the captions, as they have many viewers who are not native speakers and require captions to aid understanding. These days, it is also a good idea to provide original-language captions, as people often stream content with low or no sound.

The perfect project for a graphic novel fan

I couldn’t contain my excitement when the request to subtitle this ARTE documentary landed in my inbox. I have been a fan of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” since my undergraduate degree at UCL, where I studied it as part of a module called Sequential Art as a Form of Engagement. During my final year, I also managed to dedicate two whole modules to comics, including another on Tintin, and had also studied comic book translation during a semester at Humboldt Universität. Here, I translated a whole bande déssinée called Drink A Lol – Imbuvable from French into English. Even though I had read Maus before, it was vital to prepare well. I read it again closely, so I could recognise any references and ensure consistency with the language used in the original graphic novel.

Challenges and solutions

My client provided a script and an automated empty subtitle template in their online subtitling tool for me to work with. The automated timings weren’t great, so I made sure to improve them according to the client’s subtitling guidelines and my in-depth knowledge of subtitling standards.
The French interviewees and narrator often referenced lines from the graphic novel that had been translated from English into French. I needed to be very familiar with the original English to find the original words and ensure consistency. This was also important in order to mimic Spiegelman’s style, including the broken English used by his father who isn’t a native speaker.
Due to the documentary format, the interviewees speak with various registers according to their role. For example, Spiegelman speaks in a very casual English, while the historians speak quite formally. I carefully reflected each person’s speaking style in my translations and transcriptions, so the text reads like something they would actually say.

The result

Although harrowing, it was a brilliant documentary to work on and I was very proud to see my name credited at the end. I have subtitled many documentaries for ARTE (see my SubtleBase here), but this topic was particularly important to me. You can watch it on the ARTE platform until April 2025 but if you’re reading this after that, here are some examples of my subtitles: