Ulf Lundell is widely known in Sweden as a novelist, poet, painter, and as a singer-songwriter in the Dylan-Springsteen-Neil Young tradition. He has also translated nearly thirty tunes from English and recorded them on his own albums and singles from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century. The aim of this paper is to establish what translation methods have been used when the songs were transferred to the target language and covered by the Swedish artist. With the help of Johan Franzon’s (2021) system of classification of popular songs in translation, I will try to find out whether the corpus material is dominated by cover versions that stay faithful to the source texts (“Near-enough translations” in Franzon’s vocabulary) or freer variants such as “Lyrical hook transpositions” and “Single-phrase spinoffs” – or even target texts that do not resemble the source text at all (“All-new target lyrics”). I will specifically investigate if these target texts present the same shift that has been previously identified in Swedish renditions of French chansons – that is, a change over time from somewhat loose adaptations in the target language to more faithful translations. Finally, I will examine to what extent techniques such as domestication and foreignization (Apter & Herman, 2016) and generalization and particularization (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1958) can be identified in the target texts.
References
Apter, R. & Herman, M. (2016). Translating for Singing. The Theory, Art and Craft of Translating Lyrics. Bloomsbury.
Franzon, J. (2021). The Liberal Mores of Pop Song Translation. Slicing the Source Text Relation Six Ways. In: J. Franzon, A. Greenall, S. Kvam & A. Parianou (Eds.), Song Translation: Lyrics in Contexts (p. 83-121). Frank & Timme.
Vinay, J.-P. & Darbelnet, J. (1958). Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. Didier.