Translating non-English lyrics to English
I am wondering what are some guidelines when translating the lyrics of a song to another language, because lyrics depend a lot on musicality (rhymes, syllables), it's very hard to maintain the same meaning across languages, so should you try to keep the meaning as much as possible or not and for what reasons?
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A song has lyrics and music. Translating the lyrics, you'd want to keep the music. It means that as you're translating, you'd have to try to sing each line to the original music. The beats would have to fall in the same places.
There are other auditory elements you might want to preserve, or at least try to preserve. Alliteration sounds like music in our ears, for example, so whenever possible, it should be kept. Preferably with the same letter, though that might not be possible. Pay attention also to homorganic consonants.
On the other hand, lyrics tend to be less rich in layers of meaning, so that should make your job easier. You should, of course, preserve the general meaning and the overall image created by the song, but consider, for example, Queen's Fat Bottomed Girls: if, for reasons of rhyme or meter, a translation to another language changed "blue-eyed floozy" to "brown-eyed floozy", the overall meaning of the song wouldn't change one bit, would it? That is to say, you have a bit more leeway with the particular words, than if you were translating prose.
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