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thelinguist.uberflip.com APRIL/MAY 2016 The Linguist 23 FEATURES the songs are performed with translated lyrics. According to Di Giovanni's contextual study of the translation of American musical films in Italy, "This strategy shows the total integration of songs within the film narrative." It was first used in the 1960s, at least in Italy and Spain, for films such as The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. This was in marked contrast to the "partial translation" strategy these countries adopted in the early days for films such as Top Hat and Singin' in the Rain, where "dialogues were dubbed but songs were not translated. 8 Since then, full dubbing has commonly been adopted in Spain and Italy for animated children's musical films, such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King – the only genre normally translated in this way today. Sense The "constraints of song-translation necessarily mean some stretching or manipulation of sense," as Low points out, advocating what he calls "acceptable accuracy". 9 An illustrative example is provided by the scene in My Fair Lady in which Eliza is given the pronunciation drill 'The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain' to get rid of her Cockney accent. The Spanish dubbing shows an ingenious adaptation of sense in order to keep the function of the episode: 'La lluvia en Sevilla es una pura maravilla'. Only the idea of 'rain' (lluvia) and the presence of rhyme have been maintained for the sake of making the new lyrics fit the original music and scene. The object of her learning changes from /e I/ (which she pronounces as /aI/ in her cockney accent) to a (now rare) consonant distinction in Spanish: the palatal lateral approximant spelt as 'll', usually mispronounced as the palatal semivowel 'y'. This sentence has been adapted in various ways in different languages, appearing as 'Es grünt so grün wenn Spaniens Blüten blühen' in German and 'La rana in Spagna gracida in campagna' in Italian. Even in Spain, it has received different versions in productions of the stage musical: 'La lluvia en España los bellos valles baña' and 'El juez jugó en Jerez al ajedrez' (the former playing with the 'll' vs. 'y' distinction, the latter with the Spanish glottal fricative spelt 'j'). This criterion in Low's Pentathlon Principle would also apply to subtitling strategies. The Spanish version of Chicago presents a brief example. The strategy in Spain was, in Di Giovanni's terms, "mixed translation: dialogues dubbed, songs subtitled", a cost- effective approach that was particularly successful from the 1970s onwards. 10 When Roxy's husband refers to himself as "Invisible, inconsequential me" in the beautiful 'Mr. Cellophane', the Spanish subtitles give us 'alguien insignificante/ o yo', showing good synchronisation with the music and syntactic coherence, while slightly manipulating the sense ('some insignificant person/ or me'). Naturalness This criterion is connected to Low's recommendation that the translated song should create the illusion that the source music was devised for the target lyrics. Other researchers and music translation specialists agree on the need for naturalness in target texts meant to be sung. In the case of musicals, this would also relate to textual coherence, i.e. to issues of characterisation and tone within the film as a whole. The need for naturalness can be applied to both dubbing and subtitling. For example, in the musical episode 'Just you wait' in My Fair Lady, in which Eliza 'threatens' Professor Higgins, the Spanish dubbing uses a common expression for mild challenges, Ya verás. This maintains the lip-synchronization (since the open Spanish vowel in '-rás' matches Eliza's open lips for the cockney diphthong in 'wait'), and the rhythm of the English idiomatic phrase, which makes the singing easier and more natural. Rhythm A prosodic match would seem, as Franzon states, "the most basic requirement, since in its absence it may technically be impossible to sing the lyrics." 11 Yet Low advocates a flexible stance here. Even if an identical syllable count is desirable, the number of syllables can be changed "judiciously" (for instance, adding one on a melisma or subtracting one on a repeated note). 12 We should also consider the issue of vowel length. Languages differ in this regard. While Spanish vowels may be lengthened or shortened without any phonological consequences, English vowels are classified as 'weak' or 'strong', features which should match the nature of the corresponding notes. A schwa (weak, unstressed sound) would sound awkward on a long or a high note. The Spanish dubbed version of Disney's Beauty and the Beast provides an excellent example of the rhythm criterion in the musical episode 'Be Our Guest': '¡Qué festín!'. The sense has been slightly adapted ('What a feast!'), but the rhythm of the Spanish phrase (and the whole song) perfectly matches the notes in the music. Naturalness and characterisation are enhanced by the fact that the singer of the Spanish version imitates the French accent in the original performance. ENTERTAINING THE WORLD Jan Johannes Nymark stars in Singin' in the Rain at Copenhagen's Det Ny Teater (left); and a scene from the hit musical Cats (below) The Spanish dubbing shows an ingenious adaptation of sense to keep the function of the musical episode