Translating Song by Peter Low

Author:Peter Low
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

The specifics of the target language

All translators need to know their TL well, and song-translators need to be real wordsmiths, adept at manipulating the language they work with, resourceful at finding several ways of saying something in that language and discerning in selecting best option. The ability to generate two or more solutions to a verbal problem is crucial, and so is the ability to choose well between them.

Let us briefly consider one case – English. This is quite a good language to translate into: its huge vocabulary certainly helps. For any foreign phrase it is usually possible to find several translation options, with or without recourse to a thesaurus (a word-book or online resource not found in all languages, which goes beyond synonyms into wider lexical fields). For a simple word like “foolish”, indeed, an English thesaurus can list thirty near-synonyms to choose from. There are problems of register, admittedly: some areas of the large lexicon are too formal and Latinate to be very useful in songs. Yet even this has an advantage: the translator can, for example, deliberately choose the Latinate verb “tolerate” rather than its less formal synonym “put up with”.

English can be very concise. The ability to say something in very few syllables is a great asset for song-translators. The availability of many short expressive verbs (such as “scrub” or “drub”) is a boon when you’re translating into English – and a difficulty when moving out of English (as mentioned in chapter 2).

All languages present grammatical problems. English, being relatively uninflected, relies more on word-order than do some other languages. Its strong SVO pattern (subject-verb-object) can be restrictive, for example if you want to put the verb first. Besides, certain possibilities that do exist in English should be used very sparingly with songs – passives, for example, or the pronoun “one” when used as a dummy subject in phrases like “One often finds …”. English has an annoying habit of turning an elegant line in a foreign song into something crude and clumsy, for example the French phrase Ils s’écrivent emerges with seven syllables: “They write to one another.” Yet there are welcome areas of flexibility, such as the freedom to exploit existing prefixes and suffixes for new terms: a song-translator may even create novel but transparent phrases like “We will out-laugh you” or “She is so friendable”. This is possible, albeit a bit odd; most other languages are more resistant to such manipulation.

That’s enough about the case of English. The general point is that every TL has its own idiosyncrasies, and every TL can handle some things better than others. In every TL a translator should strive, despite the constraints of the ST, to write naturally.

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