From Waterloo Road to the Champs-Elysées. A study of French translations of British and American pop songs
From Waterloo Road to the Champs-Elysées. A study of French translations of British and American pop songs

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates French versions of British and American pop songs from the post-war period until the early twenty-first century. The aim is to establish which translation methods were used when the songs were transferred into the target language and covered by French artists. Fifty target texts were analyzed by means of Franzon’s typology of popular songs in translation. The corpus material was analyzed with regard to such factors as distribution among categories in the typology, the lyrical themes of the texts, the choices of individual translators, and the way these translators transferred the works of different composers. The results show that, even though no significant development over time could be detected, translation methods were rather evenly distributed on the spectrum between the fairly faithful variants and target texts bearing no resemblance in content to the source texts. The results also indicate that protest/anti-war lyrics were more faithfully transferred into the target language than texts exploring other lyrical themes. The domination in the corpus of covers made in the 1960s seems to reveal that decade as a golden age of pop song translation from English into French.

• Details
• Contents