- The sixth episode of the 5th season of Skam France will be available this Friday at 6 p.m. on France.tv Slash.
- This season follows the fate of Arthur, a teenager confronted with the appearance of "sudden deafness".
- As in previous seasons, fans produce non-professional subtitles for the non-French-speaking audience of Skam France .
"Ok so there there has just been a clip!" I did not expect it, I thought there would be just a new clip at 7 am this evening! Exclaims Sara * in the middle of the interview. This "clip" she is talking about is a new sequence from episode 6 of season 5 of the Skam France series, currently being broadcast on France TV Slash.
Sara, 20, is a Canadian fan of Skam France . Skam in short. She started with the original Norwegian series and has since watched versions from eight other countries that have adapted it. "Each director has his personality, each scriptwriter has his vision, it's interesting to see," says the twenty-year-old. She discovered Skam towards the end of season 3, and decided to try translating from French to English when the French version was announced.
Amateur subtitlers
It all started, for her, on Facebook. “I was in a group of fans of the original series. Someone proposed to create a group of translators for the French version. A person who had translated the original series showed us how. The team of translators has evolved over the seasons, but today there are around ten.
These amateur subtitlers of Skam France are "fansubbers", from the English neologism fansub , resulting from the contraction of "fan" and "subtitles" (subtitles in French). The practice of "fansubbing", or "wild captioning", according to the General Commission for French Terminology and Neology, developed in the years 1970-1980 around Japanese animation films and series. The Internet has allowed its expansion and today most of the series and films illegally available on the Web are subtitled by fansubbers .
Translate episodes… and Instagram posts
Sara and her team work well, which follows the method of distribution of Skam France . Like its big Norwegian sister, the series is broadcast sequence by sequence every one week, in real time. The entire episode is available on Friday. "When a clip comes out, we watch it, and the people who are available - by time, time zone - do it," explains Sara. A first person transcribes the dialogues, another translates, and a third corrects. At the end of the week, the subtitle files are gathered in the same folder, which corresponds to the entire episode.
These fansubbers of various ages - they are between 19 and 40 years old - all learned on the job to translate, to embed subtitles in a video, to put it online ... They post their work on a Tumblr blog, skamfrtranslated … Where we don't only find the subtitles of the episodes. Skam France is transmedia, and content is posted on the fictitious Instagram accounts of the characters, for example. Sara and her comrades are also responsible for translating the characters' publications on social networks.
Alexia & Arthur's chat #skamfrance pic.twitter.com/EVfk6eiAki
- Skam France (@ skamfr4) February 13, 2020International audience
They are not the only ones translating Skam France for foreign audiences. Mélanie *, 18, is a language bachelor student. She also discovered Skam with the Norwegian series. “When I looked at her, having to wait half a day to figure out a sequence of a few minutes seemed unbearable. She therefore decided to translate the French episodes, "to make the wait for the foreign audience more bearable". Mélanie translates the sequences as they go "on the notes of [her] phone". "A three or four minute sequence can take me up to an hour to translate," she says.
Like the original version, Skam France has a large audience, which goes beyond the borders of France and Europe. For each sequence published on the France TV Slash YouTube channel, around twenty different languages are available in subtitles, from English to Spanish, including Russian, Korean, Slovak or Arabic. Anyone can also add their own subtitles. "We tried to put ours on the official videos, but it didn't work," says Sara. Other fans grabbed our subtitles and added them to YouTube. "
From French to English to Italian
The different groups of fans of Skam share a lot. "There is a large team of Italian fans, we send them our English subtitles and then they translate them into their language," says Sara. This team, “Skam SUB ITA”, provides Italian subtitles for seven of the eight Skam series and English subtitles for Skam Italia .
"Each remake is handled by a different team, and some people work on several versions," says Giorgia, a 22-year-old Italian who studies translation and speaks English and French. “The boy who manages Skam SUB ITA sends us the files with the English translation, and we translate that into Italian. Most people who work on Skam France do not speak French. This is where I come in, because I can translate from French, so I correct the final translation to make sure that everything is good and that the subtitles match the dialogs. "
"We couldn't have discovered" Skam " without those who took the time to translate "
Giorgia started translating Skam France while studying French and English literature at university. "I knew I was going to study translation, and I wanted to see if I liked translating and subtitles. I was so invested in season 3 of Skam France that I wanted to be able to make the series available to everyone in Italy. "Melanie, she believes that" Skam is an important series, with a message that must be shared at all costs. "
"We couldn't have discovered the Norwegian version without the people who took the time to translate, we are indebted to them," says Sara. “The fandom [the fan community] is a family, and I want to give this family the opportunity to grow. For the young woman, who is Muslim, to see "a character like Sana" (a teenage girl veiled in the center in season 4, the equivalent of Imane in the original version) on the screen was a first. “ Skam changed my life, it showed me that it is possible to have good performances. And I thought the French version should have the same luck. "
Explain Sup Course to foreigners
If the societal dimension of Skam France contributes to its appeal, it adds difficulties for amateur captioners and captioners. Season 5 addresses for example the orientation choices of the protagonists: how to translate the subtleties of Parcours Sup? In the comments on the sequences published by France TV Slash, users of YouTube explain to French speakers the French education system.
Some fansubers explain directly in the subtitles, using inserts or asterisks that would make professional captioners cringe - but that also make fansubs charming. Sara's team made another choice: "On Tumblr where we post the subtitled videos, we also make posts to explain why Imane must take off her veil before entering high school, or how Parcours Sup works ... Proof that fansubbing goes far beyond simple translation.
* The first names of "Sara" and "Mélanie" have been changed at their request.
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