Saga Norén is back on the case, and why we should be grateful to subtitlers

The good news is that Saga Norén will be back on the beat in November, complete with leather trousers and the vintage green Porsche. The Bridge is returning for its third series, and aficionados throughout the country will be busy re-arranging their Saturday dinner parties and taking the phone off the hook.

So who is Saga? She is a top cop, a brilliant and determined detective whose blunt honesty and utter inability to tell lies sows social mayhem amongst friends and colleagues. She also has Asperger’s, although the writer of the series is at pains not to state this specifically. Saga has no understanding of the norms of social behaviour which leads her to astonishingly honest reactions to colleagues. At a dinner party, she informs her colleague’s wife that she doesn’t think much of her cooking. Her inability to tell lies almost has disastrous consequences in the first series of the drama.

She doesn’t mess about with relationships either; she wanders into a bar and, without any ado,  invites a man who smiles at her back up to her flat for the night. Afterwards, she calmly trawls through the autopsy photographs of the victim in the case she is working on.

As for empathy, she has left that somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. Her redeeming characteristic is that she is a brilliant forensic detective, and her relationship with her fellow detective, Martin, is one of the highlights of The Bridge.

All this is by way of saying that Series 3 of the epic Scandi noir, The Bridge, returns to BBC4 in November. The first series set the scene and attracted many of the fans who were feeling bereft once The Killing, another hypnotic thriller, concluded.

Of course, dramas such as The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen, to name but a few, would be incomprehensible without the tireless and imaginative work of the subtitlers, who rarely get the credit they deserve.

It’s an incredibly difficult task to pinpoint le mot juste, to transform Swedish or French slang to sound natural in English, or to convey contemporary references so that they make sense to a British audience. And they have to do all this and more within strictly defined spatial limits – 37 characters per row on screen. Apparently, viewers’ maximum reading speed is 18 characters per second. So, doesn’t a lot get left out? We often joke about a character speaking for several minutes only for the subtitle to read “Yes of course”. Actually, this is a false impression. Speech sometimes does need to be pruned in the interests of intelligibility, but the overall contextual sense must be retained, particularly in the case of crime thrillers, where subtle clues may be conveyed in dialogue.

Subtitlers work as a team. If there are troublesome lines, capable of being interpreted in several ways, a native speaker will intervene. Subtitling is not about literal translation of a character’s lines, but about how, for example, a woman might confide her thoughts, or the language a 20 year old man might use when out with his mates.

So, as we settle back on Saturday nights to enjoy Saga’s artistic autism, let’s offer a silent prayer of gratitude to the tireless work of the subtitlers, without whom etc…………………….

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