When songs are translated from English into something like Mandarin – is it a word for word translation? How to rhymes work in translation?
Hearing the Mandarin version of “Yellow” while high made me think too hard about this.
In: Culture
With translation you make different tradeoffs based on the situation. You always try to translate the meaning, but sometimes you have other things you have to consider as well that conflict with trying to retell the meaning. Like, with books you can retell the story quite freely in another language. With movie subtitles, you have to keep subtitles short enough to fit screen and play at proper time. With dubs, you have to consider stress of sentences and timings and that sorta stuff so it all falls in place.
And with songs, you have to make it fit the song, rhythm and all. So you try to translate it, but very likely you end up having to make huge changes to it simply because your translated text has to fit so many precise form requirements. Most translated songs I’ve seen change the meaning in major ways, sometimes only keeping the theme, sometimes not even that.
I’m no expert, but I don’t think there are forms of text which have more crucial considerations for translation totally unrelated to the meaning of that translation, than song lyrics. Stress, timing, form, length, sound… it’s all there. Poetry and song lyrics, who would win.
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