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According to Qian Renkang and Xue Fan，Chinese translation of English lyrics starts from the beginning of the twentieth century, the waning years of the Qing dynasty. (钱仁康 1999；薛范 2001) Since the late 1980s, the number of people who love and sing English songs is on the increase, while the number of the translated version is on the decrease. This is mainly because young generations are English learners, they are willing to sing the original English songs. As a consequence, it causes a drop in social demand of lyrics translation. Accordingly, there are hardly any new foreign songs translated into Chinese for our parents’ and grandparents’ generations to sing. As a whole, the path of lyrics translation was though. But many scholars have made great contributions to the cause, such as Xue Fan, Zhou Feng, Deng Yingyi, and so on. While translating English lyrics for singing is really a hard work, it requires the mastery of music, literature and translation at the same time. Xue Fan (禾青 2015) uses bats, mice and birds to describe the connection between the subject of song lyrics translation and music and literature.
Because of its interdisciplinary trait and relatively high difficulty of translation, lyrics translation has received more and more attention today. It is meaningful to explore in this field. With a case study of lyrics of the English song A Whole New World, under the guidance of Three Beauties translation theory created by Xu Yuanchong, this paper aims at exploring the principles of Chinese translation of English lyrics.
2. Lyrics translation and song translation
Lyrics translation and song translation are two confusing terms in this field, they are often used confusedly in articles. Here are common usage of these two terms.
In a 1997 article, Zhang Zhiqiang (张志强 1997) concluded two types of lyrics translation: (1)Translating lyrics in order to show general meaning to audience. (2) Translating lyrics for singing. The criterion of his classification is whether the translated words need to be sang. He Gaoda and Chen Shuiping (何高大&陈水平 2009) gave a more detailed classification: (1) Translators give a general or brief summary in Chinese to help people understand the meaning of the song. (2) Translating lyrics sentence by sentence in order to have a contrast with the original one. Because many lyrics are as beautiful as poems, this kind of translation is aimed at learning or appreciating their figure of speech or poetry. (3) Translating lyrics to sing. In Xue Fan’s (薛范 2002) book, this kind of lyrics translation is named song translation. That is to say song translation involves translation, literature and music, three subjects. In a 2015 article, Wang Yan and Yan XiaoBin (王岩& 闫小斌 2015) state that song translation covers lyrics translation. The confusion caused by these two terms means a unified definition is essential.
In this article, the author talks about the second type of lyrics translation in Zhang Zhiqiang’s classification, which is also named song translation by Xue Fan. But from a scientific perspective, lyrics can be translated while songs can not. Therefore, in this article, the only term used to refer to translating lyrics for singing is lyrics translation.
3. Research methods
3.1 Material
In this article, the research object is the theme song of Disney cartoon film Aladdin, A Whole New World, which won an Oscar Award for the best film song. With a soft melody, beautiful lyrics and sweet voices, the love between Aladdin and the princess is fully revealed. Now it becomes a classical love song.
Among the three versions, only one of them gives the author’s name, which is published under golden songs appreciation section. In order to ensure a good reading experience, these translations are called version A, version B and version C.
3.2 Method
Under the guidance of Three Beauties Theory, through comparative analysis of three versions of the lyrics translation of A Whole New World, the author explores the principles and key points of Chinese translation of English lyrics.