Responses
to Question
re
Translating
Worship Songs
QUESTION
Excerpt from: " S.T."
"…I am looking for some guidelines/principles to translating (worship)
songs. I am interested in writing an article for my website (and hopefully
elsewhere) on the topic of translating English choruses. Here in Poland, there
are multiple translations of songs, many of which are not good in terms of
language or theology; they may drastically change the melody (or even chord
structure), the meaning etc. Here we don't have the problem of "ethnic"
music styles (though one could argue that Jewish type choruses seem to strike
a chord with many Poles.) This is a Central European country with a rich heritage
of classical as well as folk music.
There is a real deluge of Australian, American and British music, to the unfortunate neglect of good Polish choruses that are being written (it's much to buy an English language worship CD). There's nothing wrong with translating things but it would be great to find some tools to help people do it better and at least think about what they are doing. Many don't understand the English very well, esp. poetic language, or aren't musicians. (The accents land differently in the Polish language so it's often very hard to come up with a good translation that works musically.)
If you know of any such principles/guidelines for translating songs or even poetry, I'd be glad to hear from you. Perhaps people in the ethnic music world have something like that? (Or maybe they don't want anything like that! :) Anyways, if you don't know of anything, could you perhaps include a request about this in your next newsletter? Thank you so much!..."Blessings, S.T.
Response #1
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"…As a matter of fact, I have a brand-new article with guidelines
for translating hymns at my desk. I'll forward it to you soon. We actually
advocate composing new Christian songs instead of translating ones from western
Europe… The article is going to be published in EthnoDoxology journal
soon"…(see Ethnodoxology table of contents: http://members.aol.com/ethnodox/contents.htm
)
Blessings, Paul Neeley
Editor, EthnoDoxology journal
http://ethnodoxology.org
Response #2
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"…To add to the comments just received from Paul Neeley, below are
some guidelines I have personally used when having songs translated between
English and Spanish. These comments do not emerge from a careful study of
the subject, but just reflect personal guidelines I have used.
I am in total agreement with Paul that ultimately our aim is to encourage
indigenous song composition and not translation as the best approach. I realize,
of course, that there are places that want to use translations while in the
process of raising up local composers.
My general guideline has always been summarized in one statement:
Always aim to preserve as much as possible the original rhythm and melody.
Some ways to do that are the following:
a. use translated words that as closely as possible preserve the natural accented
and unaccented flow of the original rhythm
b. add or lessen the rhythmic note values only if necessary to allow for the
natural rhythmic flow of the translated text
c. use paraphrase rather than exact word-for-word translation if it preserves
the thought without altering the melodic or rhythmic flow
d. accept for rare exceptions, always try to keep the original melody intact
I'm sure there are those out there that would disagree with some of the above.
No doubt Paul's article will give more comprehensive guidelines.
Warmly yours, Frank Fortunato, International
Worship & Arts Network
(from July-Aug05 EW&AF Newsletter)
Great Commission Worship & Arts Center