Three years ago, I tackled one of the toughest subtitling jobs I’d ever been faced with: a documentary called Wandersplitter (“Moving Shrapnel”) consisting of over 4 hours of footage of German filmmaker Thomas Harlan talking (rapidly) to the camera about his life and work.

It was a fascinating project, but also an exhausting one in that every single minute of the film was so densely packed with words, images and ideas that it took all of my mental and linguistic capacity to unpick what the guy was saying and translate it into comprehensible chunks which would fit into two short lines of subtitles at the bottom of the screen.

Also, it takes much, much longer than a minute to translate a minute’s worth of conversational speech, so by the time the project was done, I had spent hours upon hours with Thomas Harlan—or at least, with his image on my computer screen and his voice in my headphones. It was strangely intimate to spend so long in the “company” of a single individual like that, and it made me feel as though I knew Harlan somehow, or as if I had been the one speaking with him and not the invisible translator tippity-typing away in obscurity all by myself.

As an invisible, obscure translator, I rarely get to see the final result of my work, and even if I do get to see it, my name isn’t generally attached to it. There are notable exceptions, of course, but as rule, I send my translations out into the ether and that’s the last I have to do with them. In the case of Wandersplitter, I knew that my subtitles would be used on the DVD release of the documentary, and I knew that, at some point, I would want to get my hands on that DVD, if only to have some tangible proof of all the work I put into it.

As is the way with these things, time passed, and other projects came and went, and I kind of forgot about Wandersplitter until a few weeks ago, when I was reminded of it in a very roundabout way: Brighton’s wonderful Duke of York’s Picturehouse announced at the start of November that there would be a 30th-anniversary screening of The Shining next February including a Q&A with producer Jan Harlan. I quickly Googled Jan Harlan to find out a bit more about him and, lo and behold, on his (brief) Wikipedia page, it mentions that he is the nephew of Veit Harlan, the infamous Nazi propaganda filmmaker who was Thomas Harlan’s father.

That odd coincidence finally prompted me to track down Wandersplitter online (by the way, I did not translate the description on the website) and whip out my credit card (and yes, I do slightly resent having to shell out money for something I helped to create, but that’s how these things go).

The DVDs showed up a few days ago, and I’ve found it both intriguing and harrowing to watch the things with the subtitles turned on. I still think I did a pretty good job, but I can’t help but get hung up on the occasional awkward phrasing or unclear formulation—and knowing that they’re “my” subtitles just makes me infinitely more critical of them. Still, I’m glad to finally have this token of a long-completed project—even if, of course, the name of the invisible, obscure translator is nowhere to be found on the DVDs.