legends · 4 min read ·
Subtitle Track 3
A subtitler opens a hidden caption track and finds notes written by the audience, including a note about her.
**Translator's note (Ilse Brandt, Nordic festival subtitles)**
The film is a small Finnish-Estonian co-production called *Sanat*, about a bus driver on a night route who notices that the same passenger boards at every stop and never sits down. I was hired to subtitle it for an English festival screening. The distributor sent the picture file and three subtitle tracks: the original Finnish, a rough machine English, and a timed track labelled *Track 3 — do not edit.*
I was not supposed to open Track 3. I opened it.
Track 3 contains the same dialogue as the film, but each line carries a comment in square brackets. I have copied a selection below, with timecodes, so the festival can decide what to do with it.
· · ·
- 1
- 00:00:12,400 --> 00:00:15,100
- [Audience counted: 14. Seats: 16.]
- The last stop is at the hill.
- 2
- 00:00:15,200 --> 00:00:18,900
- [Two seats empty. Do not look at them.]
- Don't sit by the window tonight.
- 3
- 00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:22,700
- [Passenger boarded at stop 4. Stop 4 is not on the route.]
- I'll drive you as far as you want to go.
· · ·
Track 3 is timed to the picture, and the picture is timed to something else. In the first reel the bus pulls up at the hill stop and the doors fold open on an empty road. The subtitle reads, *Last stop.* In the frame, the passenger in the back seat stands up and walks toward the doors. In Track 3, the bracketed line reads, *Passenger has been standing since stop 2.*
Nobody in the film stands up at stop 2.
· · ·
- 41
- 00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:08,500
- [Driver has counted the passengers 41 times tonight. The number changes each time.]
- Hold on. Someone's coming up the steps.
- 42
- 00:23:08,600 --> 00:23:12,300
- [Footsteps on the stairwell. Eight steps. The driver's are seven.]
- It's only the tall one. He always comes up at this stop.
- 43
- 00:23:12,400 --> 00:23:14,000
- [There is no tall one.]
· · ·
I went back to the film file and watched reel four again with Track 3 switched on. The bus doors open. The passenger in the grey coat climbs the steps. I can hear the footsteps through the speakers. The sound is a little ahead of the picture, the way a voice on a bad line is ahead of the lips.
The subtitle appears a half-second later. It says *Eight steps.*
The footsteps stop at seven.
The camera pans to the driver's face in the mirror. He is counting too. His lips move. The subtitle does not say anything about him. It only says, in brackets, *Driver is also a passenger.*
· · ·
- 77
- 01:04:20,000 --> 01:04:24,500
- [This is the stop where the bus is supposed to turn around.]
- We're not going back, are we?
- 78
- 01:04:24,600 --> 01:04:31,000
- [Track note: editing is not permitted. Subtitles are generated from the audience. If you are reading this, you are the audience.]
- Let's keep going. Nobody needs to get off.
· · ·
I stopped the file there and rang the distributor. A woman called Miriam answered. She said the Track 3 file had been built by the film's own sound team, and that the team had not included any bracketed notes, and she would look into it.
I asked her whether anyone had ever seen the film's final reel.
She was quiet for a while. Then she said, "We haven't got a final reel. The film stops at reel seven, when the driver gets to the terminus. There's a title card, and then the screen goes to black, and then the audience starts coming in, row by row, and they don't leave."
"Do they come back?"
"Not as far as I know," Miriam said. "The festival is tomorrow. We're showing reel seven. Would you like to do the live subtitles?"
· · ·
The screening was in the old cinema on Mill Street, a long room with two hundred seats and a single exit at the back, marked by a green light that did not come on.
I sat at the desk at the side with the subtitle laptop. Track 3 was the one I was given to run. I had been told it would be automatic.
The house lights went down. The reel began.
I watched the first subtitle appear. *Last stop.* Then the second. *Don't sit by the window tonight.*
Then a third line appeared, which had not been in the file, in the same font:
*Audience counted: 200. Seats: 200. Subtitle operator: 1 more than is expected.*
I looked up. The audience was facing the screen in silence. The seats at the back were full. In the middle row, one seat was empty, and beside it a woman in a grey coat turned her head toward the desk, and looked at me, and waited for me to read the next line.
It was already on the screen.
*The operator will need to take a seat.*