Ghabat Kabira – When the Great Forest Fell
“Ghabat Kabira” is the Arabic translation of “När storskogen föll”, a documentary film from 1976 by filmmaker Erik Eriksson (1933-2005). The English title is “When the Great Forest Fell”. “Ghabat Kabira” was also an externally funded educational and integration project that the museum in Ljusdal ran during 2019-2020. On paper, it produced subtitled versions of this film in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Swedish and Tigrinya (plus a few other languages that are not quite finished yet) – its main results, however, were all about social inclusion.
When lumberman Erik Eriksson was in his thirties, he decided to become a documentary film maker instead. He ended up producing well over a hundred films before passing in 2005. They capture a way of life that is almost gone today, even though it was not that very long ago. In “When the Great Forest Fell” Erik interviewed former lumbermen who remembered the days when forestry work in the middle of Sweden still involved horses, hard labour and long, cold winters. To make up the film he alternated these interview clips with reconstructed work scenes.
Subtitling a film involves several steps. After the initial transcription, we made a simplified version of the text to make technical terms and dialectal expressions easier to understand and translate. This text also needed to be short enough to fit the screen. The free subtitling software we used kept track of our lines and timestamps, so further translations could be made almost line by line and fitted into the program. The project involved all kinds of people. Schoolchildren and people in work training made simplified Swedish and English versions, whereas other translations were made by immigrants or retired people, all with skills in a particular language. We also needed people who could explain old logging terms, and people who could help us proofread. Obviously, everyone involved in “Ghabat Kabira” ended up learning quite a lot about historical lumbering, especially considering some languages do not even contain a forestry vocabulary.
These translations were not made by professionals, and occasionally that might show in the subtitles. However, the social and educational aspects were always at the heart of this project. People grow when they feel needed and appreciated. Schoolchildren took pride in the fact that they did real and useful work, and for once the language skills of people born outside of Sweden were seen as an asset instead of a problem. “Ghabat Kabira” also gave lonely or isolated people a connection and a purpose.
What we learned
Looking back, we were far too optimistic about how many translations we would manage in the allotted time, and there were many steps in the workflow that we had overlooked; we discovered bottlenecks and handled all sorts of technical issues. Most of all, however, we laughed together at the problems and the occasional craziness, and then worked out ways of solving them. After all, this was always primarily an educational and social endeavour!
Link to the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziOMCaStt8g Länk till annan webbplats.
Link to all of Erik’s documentaries that is available on DVD (mostly without subtitles though): https://www.ljm.se/verksamhet/film/erik-eriksson Länk till annan webbplats.