Spontaneous quiz just because: 6 song translations

In honour of the Translation in Music conference which is taking place down the road in Cardiff this weekend, I thought it might be nice to have some song-related translation fun.

What popular English-language songs, most famously sung by which artists, are the originals (or indeed the translations) of the songs here? Answers in the comments please...

1) This one I had no idea about until I came across a link on Twitter:

2) It's the song that opens this interview clip:

 

3) This one is a perennial favourite:

4) I couldn't resist:

5) Ah, memories of summer camp circa 1989:

6) With thanks to Ali O., who introduced me to Jack Lukeman and the Black Romantics:

If anyone wants to read any more about song translation, you could try this old but fun NPR programme. There's an article about the translation of Stevie Wonder's 'I just called to say I love you' in Meta on open access. There's another article in the same journal by Ronnie Apter about translating opera (link is to direct download). There are good articles by Peter Low and others in various paywalled journals. There's an AHRC-funded project on 'Translating Music' with a list of further reading here. There was a special issue of The Translator on translation and music in 2008 (paywalled). There's an interview with Jonathan Burton and Judi Palmer of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in the Journal of Specialised Translation here.

UPDATE: Thanks to Sam B. for pointing out this article by Nicolas Froeliger on translating Bob Dylan into French. 

Visual pleasure and vintage subtitles

A snippetlet for those of my readers who enjoy film translations of yore. This clip is from an Italian release of the 1947 musical extravaganza Variety Girl, directed by George Marshall and starring just about everybody who was anybody:

In this sequence Pearl Bailey, in her first film role, part-speaks, part-sings the song 'Tired':

Italy is so well known as a dubbing territory - indeed, almost *the* dubbing territory par excellence - that nobody talks much about the role of subtitling, particularly in the first decades of sound. I did not know that Italian distributors of the 1940s ever subtitled songs, but shall be keeping an eye out from now on.

And look at the font! The size of it! The lovely clean lines of it! As the kind poster of the clip, EmeliusBisestile, observes wistfully, and as I have mentioned before, fonts from the 30s and 40s offer a kind of viewing pleasure which is lacking in resubtitled versions with more functional, modern fonts, for all their legibility and fancy dropshadows, etc.

And yet - I feel that such fonts are wonderfully charming, but I am uncomfortably aware that I cannot say what and wherefore. Are there any font nerds sorry, typeface experts out there who could do a font identification on these subtitles for me? I can just about identify it as sans-serif, but I would love to know more - what it's called, where else it was used, how it evokes that sense of period...? If print texts are multimodal in their use of typeface, and therefore typeface itself is an element of the translation of printed texts (see here for some more thoughts on this) then what's the role of the subtitle typeface, superimposed on the image, as an element of translation? What kind of meaning-making potential does it have (apart from inspiring hopeless nostalgia in geeks like me)? Comments welcome.

The many languages of Disney

I'm writing a piece at the moment on language policy and audiovisual translation, so I was interested to see this video doing the rounds on social media, featuring a twenty-five-language version of the song 'Let It Go' from the film Frozen:

It is a nice idea, even if it feels a little plastic (e.g. in the uncanny voice matching; or has this just been very carefully remixed for marketing purposes?). (And don't get me started on the costume/gender side of things - spontaneously slashing the dress halfway up the thigh as an empowering gesture? Really? Sigh.)

For the curious who lack the three and a half minutes necessary to watch the clip, the languages involved are: English, French from France, German, Dutch, Mandarin, Swedish, Japanese, Latin American Spanish (interestingly), Polish, Hungarian, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Korean, Serbian, Cantonese, Portuguese, Bahasa Malaysia, Russian, Danish, Bulgarian, Norwegian, Thai, Canadian French and Flemish.

I find myself wondering is this really all the languages into which the film has been dubbed, or just a useful round number which fitted into the running time of the song? Will this film be released only with subtitles in Greek, Czech, Slovenian, etc.? (I guess very possibly, because some of these are traditionally subtitling territories; readers please feel free to confirm or deny). Or will it skip some of these territories entirely? In what languages, if any, will this film play in India? In Africa? What form(s) of translation might it have into Arabic? Enquiring minds want to know.

UPDATE 1 June 2014: There's been a lot more discussion of this online since I posted this, which answers some of the questions above. Jayne Fox kindly posted a link in the comments to this article confirming that the film had been localised in 41 languages.

There's an excellent post by Elias Muhanna on the New Yorker blog this week about the treatment of the film in Arabic - it turns out that there is only one dub and it's into Modern Standard Arabic rather than the more usual Egyptian Arabic. Muhanna gives some nice back-translations into English of what the characters can actually be considered to be singing. The comments are worth reading too.

Muhanna also links to a Youtube fan video which offers snatches of the film in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Canadian French, Cantonese, Castilian Spanish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin American Spanish, Lithuanian, Malay, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

I make that 39 languages. Modern Standard Arabic is not included, and apparently there's a Filipino cover of 'Frozen' as well which may mean the film was localised there too. The question of India and the rest of Africa still seems to be an open one.

UPDATE 29 August 2016: The article on audiovisual subtitling research and policy that I was writing when I originally posted this is now out and can be found in the journal Target (paywalled, alas) at https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/target.28.2/toc. 

translation funnies

Some light relief for exam stress/election frustration/combat fatigue/dissertation anxiety (delete as applicable):

The ALTA blog has a lovely page of foreign-language cover versions of songs and their originals. For generational-nostalgic reasons I particularly liked the German version of 'Walk Like An Egyptian', but there's something for everyone here.

And the New York Times has a great page of amusing translated signs from foreign places with more funny than you can shake a stick at (and some quite thought-provoking ones too).