Tranlating Italian pop songs for a German audience: theoretical and practical issues

This paper will present an overview of the field of song translation, focusing mainly on the translation strategies used to produce a singable target text. The discussion will be based on a variety of Italian pop songs translated and performed in German. The results of the analysis suggest that, to handle the form of a singable song, translators must not only operate on the verbal text but also focus their attention on the non-linguistic systems (music and perspective performance) that contribute to the overall effect of the translated song on the target audience. This entails that, in many cases, the lexical, structural, and poetic characteristics of the source text are subject to changes.