The National Film Board of Canada is a federal cultural agency that has participated
in the wider discourses of Canadian society since its foundation in 1939, both as a producer
of innovative, award-winning fi lms and as a key player in shaping national identities
and engaging with government policy. While most research considers the NFB’s
French-language and English-language productions as separate threads of its history,
a translation studies perspective can draw attention to the versions of its fi lms and study
the insights they offer as a specifi c practice within audiovisual translation. This article
provides a brief overview of the NFB’s versioning history, evoking various translation
issues that emerge over the decades. It then focuses on one documentary, the highly
praised French-language feature fi lm Pour la suite du monde (For the Ones to Come)
(Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault, 1963). Because both a voice-over and a subtitled
version of this fi lm were produced, the two English versions can be compared to see
how different translation strategies affect the voice of the fi lm – and that of the NFB,
which comes through implicitly.

The National Film Board of Canada is a federal cultural agency that has participated
in the wider discourses of Canadian society since its foundation in 1939, both as a producer
of innovative, award-winning fi lms and as a key player in shaping national identities
and engaging with government policy. While most research considers the NFB’s
French-language and English-language productions as separate threads of its history,
a translation studies perspective can draw attention to the versions of its fi lms and study
the insights they offer as a specifi c practice within audiovisual translation. This article
provides a brief overview of the NFB’s versioning history, evoking various translation
issues that emerge over the decades. It then focuses on one documentary, the highly
praised French-language feature fi lm Pour la suite du monde (For the Ones to Come)
(Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault, 1963). Because both a voice-over and a subtitled
version of this fi lm were produced, the two English versions can be compared to see
how different translation strategies affect the voice of the fi lm – and that of the NFB,
which comes through implicitly.