Just to prove that I'm not just sadposting and still have some linguistics content, here's a project I've been working on. And by working on, I mean put together in a couple hours this evening, instead of leaving it for next week like I originally planned to.
So once I finish "Fishing for Birds" my next project is an EP called "Scandals from the Karaoke Booth" which is a bunch of covers. I did the first one/the opener a long time ago, a cover of Sparklehorse's "Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man." Which tells you a lot about what this project is like. Most people cover just Happy Man because it's a rocking song. But while it can be played alone, thematically it works best in conjunction with Chaos of the Galaxy. I took this a step further by focusing almost entirely on Chaos of the Galaxy with just hints of Happy Man, making it a cover but very much my own interpretation of it.
That's not the point though. The next song I've been working on is "Lagu Bahagia" by Sisir Tanah. Now, I can sing this just fine in Indonesian but that doesn't fit the spirit of the album. So I decided to do my own translation of it. This blogpost is about the theory behind that (and will probably make it to reddit at some point).
A literal translation of this song is pretty easy. There's only 4 verses and three of them are very similar structurally and thematically. The (mostly) literal translation (I had to make some guesses about meaning and which articles to use) goes something like this
If I were love
I only want to love
Becoming butterflies
Becoming (the) butterflies in your stomach
Becoming (the) flowers of your mind
If I were love
I only want to love
Becoming songs
Becoming (the) songs of your ears
Becoming (the) books of your thoughts (?)
If I were love
I only want to love
Becoming fog of the hills
Becoming (the) fog of the hills on your skin
Becoming the wilderness of your daydreams
Sing (out) hopes
Strive for purpose
The happiness of life
The happiness of life
(x4)
The literal translation, while nice, doesn't fit the meter of the song. There's a number of reasons for this. The first is that Indonesian simply has a lot more syllables on average than English (it's based around 2 syllable roots with lots of affixation. English loves monosyllables). So the syllable structure of the first 3 verses is actually 9/9/7/11/11 and the last set of verses is 7/7/8/8. As can be seen, the literal translation doesn't usually fit that.
There's also certain grammatical patterns in the original text that can be a bit hard to preserve in English. The repeated lines in the first three verses have love as a noun in the first line and then end with love as a verb in the second line (in a way that sounds very similar to the first: cinta/mencintai). The first two verses use reduplication (as plurals though kupu-kupu "butterfly" is ambiguous) to great effect but that's a lot harder to convey in English since English doesn't usually need to double the syllables to make something plural. The fourth and fifth lines of each verse follow the pattern of "your body part/your mental thing" which means they all end in "mu." This creates a really nice feeling in english that is hard to replicate since the word orders are slightly different.
Below is my much looser translation. It mostly fits in the syllable pattern (with one exception, which I'll discuss below) and while the meter/rhythm isn't perfect I've tried singing it and it follows the melody well enough. I'll probably still tinker with it when I move into the scoring part of song.
If I could be your lover
I'd only want to love you
Becoming the butterflies
Becoming the butterflies that fly in you
Becoming the shining blooms that brighten you
If I could be your lover
I'd only want to love you
Becoming the quiet songs
Becoming the quiet songs that ring for you
Becoming the poems and prose that read for you
If I could be your lover
I'd only want to love you
Becoming the rolling fog
Becoming the rolling fog embracing you
Becoming a wilderness to nourish you
Sing out loud all of your hopes
Don't give up what you can dream
This is the joy we find in life
This is the joy we find in life
(x4)
So let's talk about this translation. The first thing to note is that my 9/9 lines are 7/7. I tried really hard to get this to be 9 syllables but nothing fit well (I am not a poet). Luckily the way the melody goes makes it easy to fit it to 7 syllables instead of 9. The actual translation was really difficult too. At first I tried "If I could be her lover/I'd only want to love her" since "lover/to love her" sort of has the same effect as "cinta/mencintai" but that runs into issues because the rest of the song is sung to a second person. I also tried the first line with various variations of "If I were to be your/her love(r)" but "could" just sounded better. I went with "lover" instead of "love" because "cinta" is two syllables. In Indonesian, there's no indication of who (if anyone) these two lines are directed to. I decided they are directed to "you" like the rest of the song because that fits English better. This could change as I continue to rework these lines though.
Moving on to the next set of lines, there's some pretty big changes. I completely dropped the "your [noun]" structure because it didn't sound as good in English (I tried, I really did). Instead I chose verbs that fit similar enough ideas and allowed me to end each line in "you." This sounds similar to the original song, which is nice. Since pluralization wouldn't get me the syllables I needed, I threw in adjectives that felt good enough (and I think work with the stress patterns? Maybe not but eh whatever it works with my singing). These changes together lead to some pretty big deviations. While "Becoming butterflies that fly in you" is close enough to "Becoming butterflies in your stomach" most of the rest of the lines are very different. I think they get the point across though.
Finally, the last set of verses are completely different. I kept the first two lines as imperatives but I had to add a lot to fill them out. Is "strive for" the same as "don't give up" or "purpose" the same as "your dreams"? No, not really but they have similar enough feels. For the last line I had "This is the happiness of life" but it didn't flow good with the melody in my opinion despite having the right number of syllables. So I really changed up the structure of those lines but I feel like they work better now. It's all subjective though.
Anyway, that was my most recent adventure in translating. It honestly was a lot faster than I expected though being a simple song really helped with that. I wouldn't call my interpretation a good translation by any means but it should work well for the feel of my EP. Doing something good just wouldn't be right for Šyþed Pyklez.
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