The Site for English-Speaking Fans of Henning Mankell's Detective Series
Featuring Kurt Wallander of Ystad, Sweden,
A small town outside of Malmö in the southern province of Skåne.
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| English subtitles for Wallander DVDs |
| Posted 6 March 2005, updated 30 March 2005 |
 Many
readers of Mankell's Kurt Wallander series who live
outside of Sweden are surprised to find out that
there have been 7 films made from the series (plus
two films of
The Return of the Dancing Master and one of
Before the Frost). Unfortunately, out of all
of those films, only The White Lioness and
The Man Who Smiled are available with English
subtitles and only The White Lioness is for
sale in the
US and
Canada. As far as I know, no company has
announced plans to translate the rest of the films
into English nor sell them in the UK, US or
Australia.But I am pleased to announce a project that myself and some other Wallander fans have been working on since the end of last year. We've been translating the Swedish subtitles from The Fifth Woman and Sidetracked DVDs into English. The goal of our project is to produce English subtitles which can be used by owners of the Swedish DVDs, allowing them to watch the films in English. Basically, when someone plays one of these DVDs on their computer, they can instruct their DVD player software to load our optional English subtitle files. Once loaded, the English subtitles will replace the Swedish subtitles during playback of the film. Although our work is not yet finished, there has been some amazing progress made. As of today, nearly all of the 2000 lines of dialog (see part 1 and part 2) from The Fifth Woman have been translated. Sidetracked is still very much a work-in-progress, with roughly half of the 950 lines (see here) completed. The new subtitles are stored in SRT format and are available to download from here:
If you are interested in seeing these films, I would recommend that you purchase the 3 Disc DVD box set containing The Fifth Woman, Sidetracked and The Man Who Smiled. Since The Man Who Smiled already contains English subtitles, you would be able to watch all three films in the set:
Unfortunately, these DVDs are not sold outside of Sweden so I recommend you get them from one of Sweden's online DVD stores:
Those stores are in the Swedish language and all prices are denominated in Swedish Kronor (SEK). For help navigating the DVD.se site, please see the instructions I posted last year. To view these films you will need a computer which can play Region 2 DVDs and have DVD software capable of loading alternate subtitle files. I have posted instructions to help people here. Finally, I want to acknowledge and thank the people who have contributed to this translation project: myself (Art Wallace), Nick Catt and Lennart Christiansson. And we received invaluable assistance with colloquial Swedish from some helpful posters at the Amerikanska.com forums. Contributions from other people are welcome. If you see any spelling, grammatical, punctuation or translations errors, please send me an email with the details so I can get the fixes posted. |
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