At the end of September 2024, I had the honour of subtitling the recording of the play Ils nous ont oubliés (They’ve forgotten about us) for Comédie de Genève, one of the theatres where the play was shown during its tour in 2023. The play was produced by CDN Orléans/Centre-Val de Loire and is based on Thomas Bernhard’s The Lime Works (Das Kalkwerk), adapted and directed by Séverine Chavrier. I provided both a subtitle file and hardcoded subtitles in English for an international audience, so they can be used for surtitles in future international tours.

The Lime Works (Das Kalkwerk) is a surrealist tale written in the 1970s about a man and his disabled wife who live in an abandoned lime works. The man is obsessed with writing a study on the sense of hearing and tirelessly performs experiments on his wife, yet is perpetually interrupted and waiting for the ideal moment to write it all down. Sound is very important in Severine Chavrier’s adaptation – distant knocking, banging, gunshots and percussion add a nightmarish soundscape to a disorientating set made up of scaffolding, different levels, real-life birds (!) and CCTV cameras.

The translation was often a challenge. Set in the present day, the dialogue intertwines both verlan, slang and extracts from the 18th century novelist Novalis and Kropotkin’s anthropological essays. The translation of sensitive and derogatory terms was also challenging. I was very aware that language has evolved since the 1970s translation, yet the actors had absorbed the language used in the French translation of The Lime Works as part of their process and used similar expressions when improvising. I had to strike a balance between the director’s artistic intent, characterisation, the kind of language used in the 1970s and modern-day sensibilities.

While I had a rough script, the actors improvise and some characters use quite obscure, gruff voices that were difficult to understand. Luckily the theatre’s assistant manager who had followed the production closely was happy to answer any questions I had to make sure the translation was accurate and faithful to the director’s intentions. While I was using US English, I also had to consider that the subtitles might be used as surtitles when touring in the future, which influenced some translation decisions based on the needs of an international audience.

Overall, I had a lot of fun translating as the language is very playful and despite the morbid nature of the plot, there’s actually quite a bit of humour. At one point, I had to come up with lots of ways of saying “she stinks”. I found that in English, we have far more adjectives than verbs! Additionally, as part of the man’s experiments on his wife, he repeats lots of words that sound the same – but of course, in English, the translations were not always as similar and I had to get creative.

The project was a joy to work on, and I was very thankful to the client for the collaborative approach and their willingness to help with any questions I had. While I mostly work on films and series, theatre is where my love of the arts all started and I spent much of my student life acting and directing theatre productions. It was therefore a wonderful opportunity to not only translate but subtitle a play. I didn’t want the subtitles to read as written text, but as lines that could be said by the characters if the play was staged in English. The client was very happy in the end, so I think I was successful!