When anyone looks up "Aline Lapeire" on the popular search engine, they find a lot of sites that actually concern me. There are not many Aline Lapeire's in this world, or so it seems. People are redirected to my Facebook, a review about a cellphone I once wrote, a Wikipedia page of an author with whom I wrote a book and much more. But the internet can also reveal more embarrassing sites about your person. In my case: dozens of pages with translated song texts.
My site of shame is nedtlyrics.nl, a Dutch site on which you can post translated lyrics. I discovered this site when I was 15 years old and thought it was great! It was very enjoyable to look up lyrics, translate them from English to Dutch and put them on the internet for anyone to see. I admit, vain definitely played a part in it. Soon, I told my English teacher about the project and she was so enthusiastic that some of my translations were even published in the school magazine. I really expanded my vocabulary during that period, because I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary. After a while, most lyrics I liked were translated already and I lost interest in the site.
That could have been the end of story, but alas. A few months ago, a new friend of mine opened an msn conversation with a very awkwardly built sentence. At first, I didn't realise what he was talking about. But after a few quotes, the penny dropped. Apparently some people like to google their friends to discover long forgotten secrets of the past.
So I went back to the lyrics I had translated and felt quite silly. My interpretation of the lyrics had been very literal and it looked as if I'd just run the text through Babelfish. If in "Downtown train" by Tom Waits, something captures one's heart, in my version the heart was actually imprisoned. When Shirley Manson of Garbage 'hangs upon every word', well, in my translation there in fact is the danger of falling.
Now, I know that some lyrics, most lyrics, are not meant to be translated. Some English expressions just can't be put into Dutch, neither the other way around. Translating songs was a good exercise, but in the future, I'd rather work with less poetic language and blush whenever someone brings up my past hobbies.
*They have nothing that will ever capture your heart (Tom Waits)
2 opmerkingen:
Hey Aline, I translated song for you for nice blog. It's Flanders song, so go feel homesick. You be missed terrible.
When I was hungry,
I came to you,
You said: “you can eat,
If you wash the dishes”
People like you don’t have to do difficult
Give them a chance before they go do stupid
Een reactie posten