In the English-speaking world, the choral classics of Bach, Mozart etc

TRANSLATION AND MUSIC PROJECT

Use and non-use of translations by choral singers, concert-goers and conductors

A questionnaire and interview study

© Brian Mossop 2007

Do you have comments, or would you like to work with me on this project? Write me at brmossop@yorku.ca

Download first drafts of questionnaires:

www.yorku.ca/brmossop/Choristers.doc

www.yorku.ca/brmossop/Conductors.doc

www.yorku.ca/brmossop/Concertgoers.doc

What happens when translations arrive in the hands of their users? In Translation Studies, considerable attention has been paid to the effects of translations on receiving societies, but how are translations actually used by individuals?

This project investigates the use of translations by amateur choral singers, their conductors and their audiences. In English-speaking Canada, as in many countries, choral singing is an extremely popular pastime. Choirs Ontario, a federation of such choirs in the Canadian province of Ontario, has some 50,000 members. Some choirs are attached to religious institutions, but there are also very large numbers of non-religious amateur choirs. Most choirs regularly sing works in languages which are not known at all, or not known very well, by the great majority of the singers and audience members. As a result, translations are used, to varying degrees and in varying ways, to enable the singers to know the meaning of what they are singing and to enable concert-goers to know the meaning of what they are hearing.

For the purpose of my investigation, I found that the TS literature on music and translation is not very helpful. (I haven’t determined whether musicologists have written anything on the subject.) Much of the literature concerns translations which are themselves to be sung, rather than translations which are to be used as aids when rehearsing, performing or listening to works in foreign languages. There is of course a fairly large literature on opera surtitles, but at the opera, only the audience members use the translations, not the singers and conductors. Also, the experience of viewing surtitles is inevitably very different from the experience of reading translations printed in a hand-held paper program. Unlike opera surtitles, which indicate to the audience the meaning of the words being sung at a given moment of the performance, program notes are probably very hard to use while a performance is under way, for a variety of reasons: the lighting in the hall may be too low; the consultation process may take attention away from the musical experience; the listener may find it difficult or impossible to identify the foreign-language words being sung on stage and match them to the appropriate line in the program notes; the translation may not always be directly opposite the relevant line of source text. As a result, it may be that program notes are consulted mainly before the concert begins, or during intermissions, giving the concert-goer just a general idea of the ‘story’ being told in each of the works being performed.

Peter Low, in an article entitled “Translating poetic songs” (Target 15:1, 2003, 91-110), considers seven ways a translation of a song lyric might be used:

(1) a singer reads the translation when rehearsing a song he/she will be singing in a language he/she does not know, or does not know very well

(2) listeners read the translation on a CD insert either before or while listening to the CD

(3) concert-goers read the translation in a printed program either before the concert starts or while it is in progress

(4) the conductor or another individual reads the translation aloud for the audience before the work is performed

(5) the translation is itself sung by the choir

(6) the translation is read by an audience on surtitles projected above the stage (at the opera)

(7) the translation is read by an audience as subtitles (in music videos).

For uses 1-5, Low proposes five different translations of an 1857 poem by Baudelaire (La vie antérieure) that was set to music in 1884 by Henri Duparc. He explains why he translated in a certain way, given the particular use to be made of the translation. Unfortunately he did not test the five translations. It’s one thing to imagine that a certain way of translating will be suited to a certain use. The question is: will the users actually find it suitable? In human affairs, one thing we can be certain of is that intentions will often not coincide with realities. A translator’s projection into the future of how readers will react to and use a translation may well not coincide with what actually happens.

How could the actual use of music lyric translations be studied? Ideally, an empirical study would be carried out, but this would be technologically difficult and economically prohibitive. Performances would have to be filmed, as would rehearsals (audiences use translations at performances, but singers and conductors use them mainly during rehearsals). To get any really useful results, it might be necessary to attach eye-tracking technology to the heads of selected singers and audience-members at a concert!!

I therefore decided on a questionnaire and interview study. The purpose would not be to consider the usefulness of any particular translations of a specific work. Rather singers, conductors and concert-goers would simply be asked about their experience of using translations in general.

Questionnaires of course have their limitations. Even if respondents are being completely candid, their answers may not reflect reality. Also, where the questionnaire is multiple choice (agree/disagree), respondents often do not have the time or inclination to explain their answers. To deal with the latter problem, I intend to supplement the questionnaires with interviews. I debated whether to first hold the interviews with singers and conductors in order to identify issues for the questionnaire, or whether to begin with the questionnaire and then use the results as a basis for the interviews. I decided on the latter.

I prepared three questionnaires, one for amateur singers, one for their conductors and one for people attending their concerts. The draft questionnaires may be downloaded from my Web site by clicking on the addresses at the start of this document.

Working through the above-mentioned organization, Choirs Ontario, I obtained 16 answers to the questionnaire for singers and 2 to the questionnaire for conductors. This served as a test of the questionnaires, and I quickly discovered that different people had interpreted my questions differently. While the answers from any one respondent are interpretable, it is not possible to total the answers (e.g. find what percentages of respondents answered that they “strongly agree” with a certain statement), since some people were “strongly agreeing” with one interpretation of that statement, while others were “strongly agreeing” with a different interpretation. As a result, the questionnaires will have to be reworded for wider use.

I think I’ve been able to formulate pertinent questions since I myself have been an amateur choral singer for the past 20 years, and all four of the choirs I have sung in have regularly performed works in languages other than English, languages which most members of the choirs and their audiences did not know. I’ve had the experience of singing in both languages I myself know (French, German, Latin, Russian) and languages I do not know (Swedish, Italian, Polish, Swahili).

On the basis of my experience, I think I can anticipate that one issue will be the different levels of language which singers and conductors may or may not attend to: text level (“a young woman’s lover has gone off to war and died”), sentence level (“when will he return to me?”), word level (“death”), and phonetic level (the vowel of German “Tod” versus the vowel of English “death”).

Another possible issue is what might be called simultaneity: do the singers know the meaning of a word or phrase at the moment of singing it, as they do when singing in their own language? Translations in the score may not be helpful in this regard since the translation of a word may be positioned under a different note (“death” will not be right under “Tod”), or the translation may be a free one (“He has gone from this world”). Also, attempting to glance at the translation while singing could create cognitive overload, since there are so many other things to attend to while singing (pitch, dynamics, breathing, rhythm, pronunciation of the foreign-language word).

In music, phonetics is very important because composers attend to the sounds of individual words when setting them to music. As a result, the question arises whether singers have a sense of the phonetics of the language in which they are singing, given that the phonetics is not always apparent from the orthography—a problem which may lead to ‘literal pronunciations’.

Here are some of the issued covered in the questionnaires:

- What importance is attached by conductors, singers and audiences to the linguistic aspect of choral music (as opposed to instrumental sounds, voice quality, emotional tone)?

- Within the linguistic aspect of choral music, which is more important: the sound of the words, or their meaning?

- How important is it to understand, or to convey to the audience, the meaning of the foreign-language text as a whole? of individual sentences? of individual words?

- Do choirs assume that the audience for classical choral music already knows the meaning of “agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi” in the Latin mass? Or do they assume that it doesn’t really matter to the audience what it means? Or that interest in meaning varies with the kind of work being sung (perhaps the meaning of a Swedish folk song is more important than the meaning of the Latin mass)?

- How do audiences use the translations in the programs they are given? Or do they use them at all?

- To what extent do singers refer to the translations printed in their scores during rehearsals? during performances?

- To what extent are singers aware of the meaning of every word they are singing, as they would be if singing in their own language?

- Do conductors examine the translations to see whether they actually convey the meaning of the words being sung? If they are rather free translations, do conductors provide closer renderings?

- Are the translations written out in such a way that singers can match them with the words they are singing, or so that concert-goers can match them with what they are hearing?

Let us note, in view of what precedes, that translation in the context considered here has three particularities:

This is a rare case where the speakers (singers) of the source text do not know the source language, or do not know it very well. For example a choir with no Swedish speakers singing an old Swedish folk song in Swedish to an audience which is very unlikely to include any Swedish speakers. Thus the ST speakers need translations as much as the listeners.
In music, the phonetic aspect of language is very important, perhaps even more important than the semantic aspect. Thus translation may not be as important to “music people” as “language people” might expect it to be.
The translations may be used at two points in time: before the work is performed (for example, singers may read translations over at home while rehearsing; audience members may read their programs before the concert starts) and also while the work is being performed. These two moments are quite different, in that before the performance, one can read the translation over and over, and in a leisurely manner; during the performance, reading may be distracting, and must be done very quickly.

The project will afford an opportunity for interaction with a translation user group, or rather three groups: amateur singers, audiences, and conductors. The latter are typically professional musicians, or at any rate people with degrees in music, and in my experience, they tend to gloss over interlingual matters, paying lip service to the importance of the meaning of foreign-language lyrics, but not actually doing much about it. Also, my impression is that the actions they do take to deal with the linguistic problem are often ineffectual.

The project results could lead to recommendations that would be useful to choirs. For example, depending on the results for the issue of what level of meaning is important, one might recommend the use of multiple representations of a choral work: a phonetic transcription of the SL text, a word-by-word translation, a sentence-level translation and a summarizing translation of the ‘story’. This leaves the interesting practical question of how these representations could be positioned in the score so as to be useable during rehearsals and during performance.[1]