The translation of song lyrics in popular music : German lyrics and their translation into English

This study investigates the translation of song lyrics and presents an analysis of translation outcomes. While the majority of previous studies regarding song translation focuses on the translation of lyrics from musicals and operas, this study focuses on the translation of popular song lyrics. The lyrics of eight German songs and their English versions were analysed using the approximation approach (Franzon 2009) which divides smaller textual units into the categories paraphrase, metaphrase and addition. The target texts (henceforth TT) were also categorised according to Peter Low’s (2013) song translation categories, translation, adaptation and replacement text. The aim of this study is to determine to what degree the meaning of the source texts (henceforth ST) is transferred into the TTs and to determine how Franzon’s approximation approach can be used to determine if the TTs are translations, adaptations, or replacement texts. This study found that all TTs were mostly made up of paraphrases and metaphrases, which means that all TT derived to most parts directly from the STs i.e. the TT was written using mostly direct and oblique translations. Due to the low frequency of additions and all significant details of the STs being transferred into the TTs, all song translations analysed in this study were categorised as translations