Between Words and Sounds : Cultural Misunderstanding in Literary and Song Translation

This volume’s aim is to shed new light on cultural misunderstanding, examining both the obstacles and outcomes it can entail. In the field of literary and song translation in particular, cultural misunderstanding can engender compound and wide-ranging effects. Occurrences can lead to ambiguity, the distortion of source texts or the spread of false or potentially harmful cultural images. Yet these misunderstandings can also be fruitful, dynamic phenomena with highly creative potential. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the volume’s chapters navigate thorny yet fertile instances of cultural misunderstanding, including song translation for Polish national television, the “exportation” of anglophone pop songs to Germany and France, Bob Dylan sung in French, Spanish, or Portuguese, Rimbaud’s poems translated into Norwegian, American Broadway musicals staged in Chinese, French classics of the 60ies performed by Yugoslav Singers, or the translation of Iranian novels into French. The volume’s contributors approach their subject matter from different academic backgrounds in music, literature, translation studies and linguistics.