- 期刊
Analysis of English Translation of Chinese Popular Song Lyrics -- A Case Study of Fading Fireworks
摘要
Having an overall look at the major domestic music apps like QQ Music, Cloud Music and Xiami Music, it is not uncommon to see that Chinese translations of English songs usually prevail over English translations of Chinese songs, the latter, unfortunately, even hardly seen. As a consequence, the academic research into the latter field is rather few. How about the quality of existing domestic C-E song lyrics translation? What are the reasons behind its success or failure? Has it met the need of ＂Chinese culture going global＂? If not, what problems has it been faced with and how to address them? These questions have not yet been given an answer in academic community. This paper, by having an analysis of English translation of the Chinese popular song Fading Fireworks (烟花易冷) from the perspective of linguistics (including phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics) and cross-cultural communication, is aimed at casting light into these unanswered questions. After researching, this paper comes down to the following findings. In terms of linguistics, Chinese comparatively professional translators can deal with semantics and pragmatics well but not so good with phonetics. In terms of spreading Chinese culture, they have a relevantly nice performance but there still remains room for improvement. The success may be attributed to the precise understanding of original words, sentences, and hidden meanings, as well as excellent awareness of cross-cultural communication. The dissatisfying aspect may be a result of limits of different ways of pronunciation in Chinese and English, and the special demand to match lyrics with melody. To enhance the quality of C-E song lyrics translation, this paper also proposes several suggestions. First, deletion, addition or transformation of certain words to adapt the syllables at the expense of not-that-important lexical precision is a necessity. Second, changing the sequence of words to match the stress of words with the melody without destroying grammar can sometimes have a surprising effect. Third, translators should learn more about the knowledge of rules of English poems and lyrics so that their translations could be more reader/ listener-friendly.