Abstract
This study focuses on the song ¿Quién será? (1953, lyrics by Pablo Beltrán Ruiz and music by Pablo Beltrán Ruiz and Luis Demetrio Traconis Molina), which has had many language versions so far (e.g. Arabic, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, etc.), including the English Sway (1954, lyrics by Norman Gimbel), which is often erroneously thought to be the original. The lyrics have also been rewritten in Turkish by Fecri Ebcioğlu in 1968/1987, Yeşil Giresunlu in 1977, and Athena in 2000. With particular reference to Johan Franzon’s analysis of song translation, the present article analyzes the Turkish versions in an attempt to investigate the possible constraints behind the decisions taken by the various agents of the cultural import. Given that a translated version of a source song is expected to reproduce the music and/or the lyrics and/or the sung performance, the Turkish versions appear to be adaptations with rewritten lyrics, which enable a reproduction of the melody and a sung performance similar to that of the source song. The data analysis further suggests that prosodic constraints rank the highest among the layers of singability and that translators’ attitude towards the literary quality of the original lyrics might influence their decision to adopt assimilating strategies or not.
“This paper is dedicated to the memory of Ayşe Pınar Besen, a dear friend and colleague. May she rest in peace and music.”
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Notes
- 1.
The term “textual profile” can be traced back to House (2001). Within the framework of House’s (2001, 247–249; Figure 1: A Scheme for Analysing and Comparing Original and Translation Texts) functional-pragmatic model of translation evaluation (based on Hallidayan systemic-functional theory), an original and its translation are analyzed and compared on the Language/Text, Register (Field, Mode and Tenor) and Genre levels in an attempt to determine whether a functional, pragmatic equivalence obtains between the two textual profiles consisting of not only linguistic features but also the interaction of many extra-linguistic factors (e.g. participants, social attitudes, etc.) within the given context of situation. For Koskinen and Paloposki (2003), a textual profile encompasses the text as well as its time, setting and context such that “the determinants of the translation’s profile come from contemporary, personal and political circumstances of the translator’s surroundings” (2003, 22).
- 2.
- 3.
All English translations are mine.
- 4.
There might be other versions that the author is unaware of, but there is a single version each in Cantonese, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, Swedish, and Vietnamese, while there are two Arabic, two Finnish, three French, and three Persian versions (most of them available online (in audio or video form) along with their lyrics in English translation provided by fans). With respect to their lyrics, some of them seem to be based on the Spanish original (e.g. the Italian version), while some of the others are reminiscent of the English Sway. Some are about happy love and many of them are about dancing, e.g. the Hungarian, Russian and Vietnamese versions. Some lyrics include references to the Spanish or English texts, e.g. expressions like “Who will love me? = ¿Quién será?” and “By my side forever = Stay with me” in the Vietnamese version. In fact, the Mandarin and Japanese versions actually incorporate the original Spanish phrases /kjɛnsɛra/ and /jonosɛ/.
- 5.
In Turkey, there were no regular TV broadcasts until 1968 and no private radio or TV channels until the early 1990s. Obviously, radio presenters had a “strong weapon” as noted by Fikret Şeneş (Akkaya and Çelik 2006, 212).
- 6.
It is highly unlikely that the Spanish cover versions that appeared until 1968 were ever played on the radio, thus making the original song inaccessible to the general audience. The Spanish text was probably inaccessible to Fecri Ebcioğlu as well.
- 7.
There may also have been personal reasons behind the choice of lyricists. In 1968 when Fecri Ebcioğlu wrote Turkish lyrics for the song Those were the Days for her elder sister Semiramis Pekkan, Ajda Pekkan was so disappointed that she shattered his window glasses with a cobblestone and did not speak to him until a few months before his death in 1989 (Dilmener 2007, 86–87). Although Fikret Şeneş worked exclusively for Ajda Pekkan for many years, not allowing Ajda to sing those songs which would have been inappropriate for her voice or public image (Akkaya and Çelik 2006, 213), their relationship had frequent ups and downs; in the mid-2000s Fikret Şeneş even legally forbade Ajda Pekkan to sing some 70 songs whose lyrics she had written. Nilüfer probably preferred Fecri Ebcioğlu’s lyrics because of her turbulent marriage with Yeşil Giresunlu which ended in 1981 (Dilmener 2006, 241, 288). And she probably would not have wanted those lyrics, which had already been identified with Ajda Pekkan. Note that “the authorial voice of pop is not that of the composer/poet, but almost exclusively that of the performing singer” (Eckstein 2010, 53).
- 8.
Please visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxAO5wclxFw for this particular cover version.
- 9.
- 10.
In the sense of Robinson (2011), both norms and biases can be subsumed under the notion of sway. “Sway is almost always a group dynamic” (2011, 9): What one group considers as a norm may be regarded as a bias by another group that may disapprove of translations guided by that norm as being erroneous (2011, 2). Swayed by “the practical wisdom of the community” (2011, 12), “translators are constrained to act in certain ways by professional networks distributing the flow of texts and money” (2011, 193).
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Güven, M. (2019). Why “Sway” Again? Prosodic Constraints and Singability in Song (Re)translation. In: Berk Albachten, Ö., Tahir Gürçağlar, Ş. (eds) Studies from a Retranslation Culture. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7314-5_11
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