A short -film programme for foreign language lessons and beyond

Many steps are needed until the dialogues of a given film have been translated into another language: from the first viewing of the film to the compilation of a dialogue list and from the distribution of the translation passages to the shortening of the texts to fit the length of the pictures being subtitled. And then there’s the whole technical subtitling process still to come. Not only that: the copyright issue is equally important since it is not allowed to translate a film and show it anew without due concern.
Long before the start of the festival week, students in an Advanced French group at the Kaiserin Augusta School in Cologne signed up for this experiment and set about writing the subtitles to the film Du soleil en hiver (aka „The Sun in Winter“). As such, the translation project was carried out in association with the Dortmund | Cologne International Women’s Film Festival and with the NRW Film Education Forum. Gaby Gehlen, a professional translator, helped supervise the high-school students in the course of their work.
The films Hjältar and Dicen – They Say demonstrate that the original language version of a film with simple subtitles is preferable to a dubbed version and more stimulating in foreign language lessons.