Editors: Johan Franzon (University of Helsinki, Finland), Annjo K. Greenall (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway), Sigmund Kvam (Østfold University College, Norway), and Anastasia Parianou (Ionian University, Greece)
Publisher: Frank & Timme, Berlin
Languages: English, German, French
Song translation can, and has been, studied in a multitude of different ways. To the extent that trends can be discerned within such a relatively small field, there seems to have been, recently, a move towards larger, more global studies of the significance of song translation within the cultural-political sphere, with less focus on the actual text-in-translation, and more focus on features of context (?). Taking as our point of departure Gideon Toury’s (1995) call for the need for a larger corpus of comparable empirical studies within the field of translation as such, we would like to advocate, in and through this volume, a return to the song lyric in translation, looking at what happens on the textual microlevel and how song translators’ choices interact with various types of context, such as the musical/artistic/performative context, the linguistic/textual/generic context, the medial/technological context, the social/institutional/cultural/political context, the historical context, the pedagogical context, and so on.
The contributions we seek could focus on translations intended or not intended to be sung (although the book’s main emphasis will be on the former); they could focus on any musical genre, and on any of the outlined types of context, either with a special focus on one of them or on the interaction and interlocking of several of these contexts simultaneously. Especially the latter would allow the volume to properly demonstrate the complexities of the interplay between text, translation and context(s) in a rich way.