A Corpus-based Study Of Changes In The Practice Of Song Translation

Song translation plays an essential role in the audience’s appreciation of the song and the cultural exchange at large. However, song translation has received little scholarly attention despite that foreign songs are widely popular in China.A song involves language as well as music, the interdisciplinary nature of whose translation differs from translation of other genres. As much of the previous research is confined to the examination of the faithful relationship between the original lyrics and the target lyrics, the present research is a diachronic one to describe the changes and development of song translation with the dividing point being the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, using Gideon Toury’s theory of translational norms to explain changes may give us a holistic picture of song translation.After identifying the constraints a song translator may be confronted with in light of the skopos-based pentathlon principle, the author conducts a comparative analysis of the song materials in two different historical phases based on the self-built corpora combing the qualitative and quantitative method. The song translator shall retain the semantic elements and mirror the singability of the original song through handling the musical elements like the length of syllables and choices of rhyme. The main research findings are as follows:1). The comparative analyses of song materials in the corpora show that song translators of an earlier generation before the mid-1980s can basically handle well the relationships of sense, singability, naturalness, rhythm and rhyme explicated in the pentathlon principle. But during the past three decades, the boundaries between translation and creation have been increasingly blurred. Song remakes characterized by adopting the foreign tune and creating irrelevant words have occupied a dominant position in the county’s contemporary practice of song translation.2). Previous studies focus on the“faithfulness”and“fidelity”between the original lyrics and the target lyrics, and thus are insufficient to account for such changes. Judging from Toury’s theory of translational norms, such changes are influenced by historical and social factors, such as the marketing and audience reception. Thus, it is essential to rethink the traditional evaluation criteria and established views on translation while taking songs’potential audience into consideration.In the end, the author hopes that more attention from the society and academia will be paid to the area, since much of the frontier in song translation is untapped.