Au moment de la clôture des candidatures sur MonMaster, nous pouvons confirmer que la date de l’épreuve d’entrée est fixée au samedi 19 avril (samedi de Pâques), de 9H à 13H, heure de Dijon. Les personnes qui candidatent aux deux parcours et qui rendent une copie supplémentaire disposeront d’une heure supplémentaire pour composer.

D’autres renseignements sur le format et des liens vers les annales des épreuves sont disponibles sur le billet Epreuves d’entrée T2M-TA2M : annales et exercices d’entraînement sur ce site.

Curator’s Corner: subtitling a sculpture from The Secretum

The video embedded below comes from the ‘Curator’s Corner’ series (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0LQM0SAx601_99m2E2NPsm62pKoSCnV5), where members of the British Museum’s curatorial staff present artefacts and the history and cotext of these artefacts both inside and outside the museum’s collections. In this episode published in 2024, Vicky Donellan explains the background to a Roman statue of a nymph and a satyr (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1805-0703-2) that was registered in ‘The Secretum’, a nineteenth-century catalogue of objects deemed unsuitable for public display.

The YouTube descrpition carries the warning: ‘GENUINE CONTENT WARNING: This video focuses on a classical depiction of attempted sexual assault, which is shown early in the video and throughout, and features other ancient sexually-themed objects.’

This practice exercise asks you to focus on the first part of the video, from the beginning to 2:30 (ending with ‘make the violence much more obvious’). For further practice, you are also welcome to apply the questions asked to the rest of the video and to other content of your choice.

The complete activity will likely take you longer than the time (roughly 60 minutes) you will have for this part of the real entrance exam but is designed to help you familiarise yourself with the expected format and practice the skills you will need. Candidates seeking feedback on this exercise are welcome to contact will.noonan@u-bourgogne.fr.

Source-language transcription

Watch the extract (and, if possible, the entire video) a couple of times and ensure that you understand all the content presented. You may find information provided in the description and on the museum’s website useful.

Make a note of any terms or expressions that you will need to research, along with their context and any resources you could use for infrormation. (You will need to use this information – see below.)

Activate the English subtitles and the transcrition view using the YouTube interface and use these to help you produce your own transcription of the voice track, making sure to transcribe everything you hear and to follow standard English spelling and punctuation conventions. You may copy and past information from the transcription box but need to check carefully that this corresponds to what you actually hear.

Comment on what you observe when viewing the transcription and subtitles

• Do you notice any inaccuracies or language errors?
• Do you notice any problems with the organisation and formatting of the subtitles? You may want to refer to the Code of Good Subtitling Practice (https://esist.org/resources/code-of-good-subtitling-practice/) and/or to other subtitling guidelines published on the ESIST’s website (https://esist.org/resources/avt-guidelines-and-policies/) or elsewhere.

Once your transcription is complete, and before you begin translation

• Double-check that you have noted all terms and expressions you will need to research.
• Compile this list and look for possible equivalents in French, noting where you found the French expression and at least one example of its use in context. You should present your results in a table in a format similar to this one:

English term or expression	Example in context	Definition/other useful information (give links or sources used to check)	Proposed French equivalent	Source used (dictionary, terminology database, other resource: give a link)	Example of French equivalent in context (give links)

Once your terminology research is complete

Translate the dialogue you have transcribed into French. For this exercise, you do not need to take into account the specific space or syntactic constraints of subtitling but should aim to produce a text that is:

• similar in length or shorter than the source text, without losing important information;
• appropriate in terms of style and register to the product and to the viewers you can imagine translating the text for (see below).

Comment on your translation

Write a few paragraphs in English to answer the following questions. Try to be as precise as possible in your answers, explaining specific examples and giving timecodes if necessary.

• What possible professional scenario and what end users did you translate the text for and how did this affect your translation? (For example, would you need to adapt your solutions depending on whether you were subtitlng the video to accompany an exhibition of artefacts from The Secretum in France, or for use in ancient history or art history classes in secondary sources?)
• What factors need to be taken into account when translating an audiovisual text such as this one? (For example, you could refer to any cases where your translation needs to refer closely to what is happening in the image or soundtrack, or to any issues you anticipate when transforming your translation into subtitles.)
• What challenges did you face when researching and translating historical and cultural references, and how did you solve them?
• As the warning given on the description page makes clear, this video deals with sexual themes and focuses on an artwork that depicts (at least what modern viewers would perceive as) an act of attempted sexual assault. What challenges does this pose for your translation and what would you seek to confirm with your client (the British Museum or some other imagined client, depending on the scenario you have imagined) if you were able to do so?