Translating Songs that Rhyme

Bibliographic Data

ID7428360
AuthorsPeter Low (University of Canterbury, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume16
Issue1-2
Pages1-20
Publication date2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePerspectives (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0907-676X • E-ISSN: 1747-6623
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13670050802364437
OpenAlexW2028773062
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited15

This article concerns 'singable translations' intended for performance in the target language. Translators have often assumed that a song-translation must rhyme as much as the original, and equally well. This false assumption underlies their poor strategic thinking, and prevents them from doing justice to four other aspects of the complex task: sense and naturalness (which are requirements of normal translating), plus rhythm and singability. No wonder singers often reject their efforts as unusable. Quoting the great composer-librettist Wagner, and some 20th century song-translators such as Drinker and Kelly, the paper highlights the need for flexibility, notably in the frequency and quality of rhymes. A score-sheet is proposed for evaluating not only true rhymes but also near-rhymes, which should be part of every song-translator's toolbox. The article ends with a comparative evaluation of three English versions of part of a Schubert song. Keywords: translatingsongrhyme skopos Notes 1. Two articles on translating for surtitles are Sario and Oksanen (1996 Sario , M. and Oksanen S. 1996 Le sur-titrage des opéras à l'Opéra National de Finlande [Sür titling of Operas at the National Opera of Finland] . In: Y. Gambier Les transferts linguistiques dans les médias audio-visuels [Translations in audio-visual media] (pp. 185 – 196 ). Paris : Presses Universitaires. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Low (2002 Low, P. 2002. Surtitling for opera: A specialised translating task. Babel, 48(2): 97–110. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Though skilful, the rhyming English subtitles used for the film Cyrano de Bergerac (Rappeneau, 1990) show how distracting this can be. 2. Even 'glory', although it translates no word of the French, is a notion present in the subtext of 'cieux'. The man who recorded this song pronounced 'gather' as 'gaather', thus raising the rhyme-score to 6.7 points (Graeme Allwright sings Brassens, 1985, Philips 824 005-1). Despite the reduction in naturalness, this proved acceptable as a humorous effect. 3. Some hearers took the first word to be the subject of the verb – even before 'softly' became the name of a laundry product. 4. Nevertheless, when the Broadway musical The Man of La Mancha (1965) was done in French, the archaisms in the original were ignored, to the advantage of the musical drama. The translating team (led by Jacques Brel) clearly did not consider verbal archaism to be an essential feature

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