The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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22 The Linguist APRIL/MAY www.iol.org.uk FEATURES As music become ubiquitous, Lucile Desblache offers a quick guide to translating songs and musical references Today, music is everywhere: where you go, where you stay, where you shop, where you listen, but also where you look. For translators, that means that music permeates many of the texts that are to be transferred. A few tips on the interlingual transfer of texts that include musical content can help, so here is a short guide to four of the challenges a translator may face and how to deal with them. Do nothing A few days after the US launch of the iPhone 5s, in September 2013, Apple promoted the phone by filming a 30-second clip of the Burberry spring/summer 2014 show at London Fashion Week to the track Soothing Me So by multi-instrumentalist Robert Fleming (better known as Victory). 1 The glamorous setting was the perfect showcase for the global launch, and the song was selected purposefully: Victory is a young independent writer, in the words of the music critic John Bauccio, 'fresh, familiar and focused' – qualities that Apple would want to attribute to their latest product. Its 'get-to- the-hook nuggets [that] get in and out of your face in three minutes or less' 2 are just what Apple must have been looking for. As so often in advertising, only part of the song is used. In the case of this excerpt, the lyrics are vague enough to relate to the object of desire that is being sold: I wanna see you my love, Wanna see you in the mirror my baby always, Ooh and if it isn't enough, If it isn't yet enough I'd turn away, Going at it, keep on going at it, Don't you stop going at it cause you're soothing me soothing me so Many translators might be relieved to read that not translating songs is one of the most common strategies in contemporary texts. Among a range of reasons for this, there are two main ones: lack of payment for translation rights and lyrics that are deemed to be unimportant. Increasingly, large media corporations, including Viacom and Time Warner Inc, refuse to pay copyrights/translation rights for song translations. This means that companies such as MTV, who translated most lyrics of songs on their television channel until about five years ago, now only offer, at best, intralingual, verbatim transcriptions of musical texts. In the case of Soothing Me So, if the song had been translated, non-English audiences would undoubtedly have established links between the owner of the iPhone 5s, known for its high performance camera, and the character of the song who wants to 'see you in the mirror my baby always'. Identifying objects for sale in parallel to human beings in songs is a common strategy. In this case, one can assume that providing subtitles was not a financial issue, but perhaps would have exposed this unsubtle association of desired object and desired being a little too visibly. In the original clip, the song is played in the background and the lyrics are not always very audible. A second reason for not translating lyrics is that the song may be used solely for its non- linguistic meaning: rhythm, atmosphere, etc. In that case, the words are more important as carriers of music than vessels of semantic sense. At times, even writers of words use them for their musical meaning over their semantic sense. The singer Enya, who has deliberately sung in Japanese and in a fictional language, Loxian, provides a good example of how words, for singers, are sometimes primarily important for their sonority. Translate if you can It may be that, although at first hearing the song is 'texturally' essential, the linguistic text also carries important semantic meaning. For instance, when Sofia Coppola chooses to use post-punk tracks, such as Natural's Not in It by Gang of Four, for her film Marie- Antoinette (2006) what she aims primarily for is the anachronistic shock that the music will produce within the period drama setting. Yet, undeniably, the words also evoke Marie- Antoinette's futile priorities, and a parallel between early 21st-century postmodern absurdities and the fin de règne preceding Lyrical concerns SOUND AND SIGHT Director Sofia Coppola (l) and lead actor Kirsten Dunst at the premiere of 'Marie- Antoinette', which used post-punk tracks to evoke the Queen's futile priorities © ISTOCKPHOTO