Analysis of the fidelity of translations from English into Spanish of christian songs, Trujillo-2015

Abstract

This research paper mainly focuses on the analysis of translations from English into Spanish of 5 Christian songs. Through this analysis, we want to identify the degree of faithfulness that these songs have and the translation techniques used to translate each song to be sung. This research is very important because there are not many studies about musical translation and even fewer on the translation of songs to be sung. Therefore, the development of this research is an enriching knowledge for every translator. For this qualitative research, the translations from English into Spanish of 5 Christian songs were selected at random. In order to determine their degree of faithfulness, these songs were analyzed based on 3 out of the 5 dimensions proposed by Low (2005), singability, sense, naturalness. These 3 dimensions were chosen because rhythm and rhyme were considered closely related to singability. Through registrations charts, we could determine that not all the translations had a high degree of faithfulness and that in each of them different dimensions were prioritized.