Piste Noire, episode 1

I hope you'll enjoy the subs to the first episode. We meet the movers and shakers of various morals in a small ski resort town. A trope in a number of French dramas is the Company Town vs. The Workers, and that is part of what we have here.  Another trope is the cop who gets called back to their home town to investigate a murder, and clashes with the local cop, and in Piste Noire they are Chief Sgt. Emilie Monfort (Constance Labbé of Crime dans le Larzac) and Maj. Löic Servoz (Thibault de Montalembert of Dix pour cent). Also on hand are a downhill skiing champion and his wife, a drug dealer, a mayor and a (probably) evil developer. It's shaping up as a competent and hopefully entertaining procedural.

Montalembert (left) and Labbé.

Language notes:

1.  The French station has the same meaning as in English, but it also can also mean resort as in ski resort, and it is used that way several times in this episode.

2. Un soleil is "a sun," and also a spectacular crash—  in cycling it's when a front wheel locks up and the rider goes over the handlebars. In skiing it's when a skier similarly crashes and flips in the air.

Falco S02E06

The English subs for this episode, Artifices, are completed and uploaded a short time ago.

This was the finale of Season 2, so there's a lot of jeopardy to the main characters, and a cliffhanger ending.

Beyond Polar Park

English subtitles for the sixth and last episode of Polar Park are completed and uploaded. It was a lot of fun revisiting the lead characters, and seeing the different direction the adaptation took the premise. I liked the charming ending that was given to the series, as much as the rather dark conclusion of the film.

Jeremy Barlozzo (left) as Barlozzo,
and Julien Drion as McCree.

Shout-outs too to the gendarmes McCree and Barlozzo, who come across as buffoons when first introduced, but acquit themselves well in the finale. Incidentally, Jeremy the-musician-not-the-Brigadier Barlozzo is a singer-songwriter who had a role in some of the series' music (though I tried but eventually gave up transcribing "Change Your Mind," his big number at the end of episode 6, because some of his English singing is undecipherable).

I'm not sure what I'll tackle next. Therefore a few words about ongoing projects:

• Falco (2013, four seasons).  I found this series in the autumn of 2022 when I was looking for more French police procedurals. The title character is played by the unexpectedly named Sagamore Stevenin, as a Paris detective who spends 20 years in a coma, wakes up in 2013, and goes back to work under orders of his old partner.  It's as lone-wolf-cop-who-plays-by-his-own-set-of-rules hokey as you'd expect, but solidly done, especially good are Clement Manuel as Chevalier the straightlaced partner, and Alexia Barlier (who is great in everything) as Eva Blum, the squad's #3. The next episode I could start subtitling is S02E06.
  
  
• Riviere-Perdu season 2 (2024). Looks like a standard-but-entertaining Gendarmes & Police Nationale procedural, starring respectively Nicolas Gob (Art Of Crime) and Barbara Cabrita (Luther season 1) as cops working on a child kidnapping case in the Pyrenees. Advantage: There are existing French subs I could work from.
  
  
• Piste Noire (2023). When a French murder doesn't happen in the woods, it happens on the slopes. This ski resort gendarme mystery appeared to be the hot property last year. Advantage: there are no subs yet (in any language) on Opensubtitles, so there's high demand--right?  Disadvantage: all the dialogue under music and ambient noise makes it look scary to subtitle (remind me sometime to tell you about Deux Gouttes d'Eau). 

That's it for everything I have on the laptop ready to cue up. Which will I choose? Prior to Polar Park, my go-to was Falco.

I will warn you that whatever I choose, I will drop everything to work on new episodes of HPI or Capitaine Marleau should any air. I understand there may be new Marleaus in March.

Polar Park (2023)

Subtitles download link

I found this little gem on the ARTE channel's YouTube page. If you saw Gérald Hustache-Mathieu's 2011 film Poupoupido (a.k.a. Nobody Else But You), you'll quickly recognize Polar Park's opening scenes:  novelist David Rousseau, in a white convertible, speaks in voiceover as he drives to Mouthe, the reputed 'coldest place in France,' a place where he spent time as a child.

It's because Polar Park the six-part TV show is a reworking of the earlier film. But where the film was a vehicle for Sophie Quinton as a rural weathergirl/cheese label model whose life parallels Marilyn Monroe's life (and death), that character is reduced to that of the second victim of a serial killer. Instead, the series focuses on the team-up between the author and the gendarme in charge of the case, with Jean-Paul Rouve and Guillaume Gouix reprising their roles from the film of novelist and gendarme, respectively. 

The case begins when a child finds a severed ear at Polar Park, a sort of wildlife theme park with an educational aspect. Oh, and 'polar' is a pun, in French it means 'thriller,' 'whodunit,' or 'detective story.'  

Although Gouix's character in Poupoupidou was 'Brigadier Leloup,' in Polar Park he's 'Adjutant Louvetot.'

Incidentally, 'Leloup' is what Rousseau calls Louvetot in the fictionalized account he is trying to write during the Polar Park investigation. And 'Louvetot' is a pun on the French name 'louveteau,' which can mean cub scout.

I started working on the subs for Polar Park early last month, and am now on the sixth and last episode. I've been pretty committed to including full-ish SDH for episodes 1-5. However I'm not doing it for #6 because, franchement, the SDH was driving me crazy. I'll try to do an SDH version in the not too distant future.

How it started/How it's going

Greetings from what's known as the Upper Left Corner of the United States, known for rain, coffee, grunge, and whales.

A few years ago I wanted to watch movies and series, mostly French, that had not yet aired in the U.S.

I got the Subtitle Edit app and started messing around with it, first creating subs for films and shows in English, just to be able to learn the software without having to worry about translation.

Then after awhile I really got down to business, creating subs for the first episode of Haut Potentiel Intellectuel (HPI). And then it was off to the races, with episodes of Muertres A..., Les Rivieres Pourpres, Astrid et Raphaelle, and my absolute French favorite, Capitaine Marleau.  

Les Rivieres Pourpres S03E03. The direct translation
of the French was "He's in his thirty-ones."

Why French? I've been to France a couple of times, but don't speak the language. I read it fairly well, but have wanted to develop an ear for it, as well as build vocabulary, as a way to edge toward becoming somewhat verbally fluent.  Subtitling seemed to be a way to learn at my own pace, without the pressure of taking a class. At the same time I can get kind of obsessed, kind of like doing a crossword or jigsaw puzzle that I can't put aside until it's Done.  

A typical translation starts when I find a video file in the wild, such as YouTube, and acquire it before it gets taken down. I try to get existing subs in French, Dutch, or German, that I can machine translate to English, and then work out the detailed translation-- including, especially, the idioms. However, as I've become a lot better at understanding spoken French, I've done more and more subs by translating audio from scratch, such as all the HPI and Marleaus.

Capitaine Marleau. Above: S03E07, "Ice Queen";
below: S04E04. "The Burning Man." 

Below: HPI, S02E03, "Made In France"

In the future, I'll be posting updates about shows/movies I'm translating to English, technical notes about subtitling, Subtitle Edit, and formatting, and interesting trivia I encounter in translating.