Lost in Translation Vol. 1
The "name that tune" series with a twist. Can you reconstruct the original lyric after translation through half a dozen languages and identify the song?
Happy Monday folks!! While a new installment of Five Faves—already on the drafting board—will be coming in the next few days, I'm launching a new series today: Lost in Translation.
Late last year, as I was noodling over where I wanted to take Joy in the Journey in 2025, I thought it would be fun to add some sort of weekly "musical game" series. One of the ideas that kept bubbling to the top of my mind was a "name that tune" game with a twist. Rather than simply providing a lyrical hint—the title of which anyone could glean with a quick Google search—I thought it would be fun to run a specific song lyric through half a dozen different languages on Google Translate and translate the final result back to English. I wondered how much a given lyric would change. Would it retain much of its meaning? Would it be so unchanged from the original English lyric that the original song would be easy to guess? Or would enough of the meaning have been “lost in translation” to make it a challenge for the average music lover to reconstruct the song from the few elements that survived?
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My first attempt at finding a good lyric (i.e. one that won't be easily solved) returned what I considered to be a challenging result—I guess we'll find out as it's this week's song!
My immediate thought was: "this is gonna work out great! Just pick a song, run it through the half dozen translations and we're good to go!" As it seemed prudent to pull together at least a half dozen songs before launching the series, I set to finding some good candidates. As it turns out, I'd been extremely lucky with my first choice of song lyric. Time and time again—in a nod to just how good online translation services are nowadays— I found that the song/lyric I chose remained stubbornly unchanged. Either too much of the song’s "flavour" remained or specific words/phrases persisted in a way which would give the song away.
Take Prince's "When Doves Cry", just one of my many choices that failed to produce a good result. I decided to start with the song's first verse:
Dig, if you will, the picture
Of you and I engaged in a kiss
The sweat of your body covers me
Can you, my darling, can you picture this?
After running through half a different language translations and back to English, here's what emerged:
If you want pictures, check it out.
you kiss me
The sweat on your body covers me.
Baby can you imagine?
The first couple lines? Not bad. I think that if I gave someone the first two lines they might struggle. But then the third line hits—"the sweat of your body covers me"—and I think, with that one line fully preserved, that most of my music-loving friends would fairly easily be able to discern the original lyric and song name.
This morning, I finally found myself with a sufficient window of time to hammer out an initial list of songs and lyrics so I have something to draw from over the next month or two. What I've discovered is that I'm only managing to come up with one challenging entry for about very twenty song/lyric candidates. Having said that, some of the entries I've come up with do feel devilishly hard, if not impossible (he throws down the gauntlet!). I guess we'll find out!
While I'm still working out the final logistics for this new series, this is how I think it's gonna work: each Monday I'll post the text of the translated song lyric and hand it over to readers to chime in. People will put some thought into it and (hopefully) jump into the comments with their guess(es) for the original English song lyric and the title of the song. Later in the week—probably within 3 to 5 days—I'll publish a new post with the translated lyric, the original lyric, and a YouTube link timestamped to the start of the lyric.
I've had a lot of fun pulling these together and I hope you all find them fun and challenging. I don't want to make these impossible, but I also don't want them to be too easy. I've tried to go with relatively well-known songs that most music lovers will be familiar with. I've not always gone with the first verse, at times going for a later verse (or part of a verse) or a lyrical bridge. I recognize that some people don't really focus on lyrics, but I'd hazard a guess that at least half of my readers are well-attuned to lyrical contents. We shall see.
And we're off!! Here's the translated lyric for Volume 1 of Lost in Translation:
“Shining stars
The sky is very dark.
I know, baby.
I will never die.”
This is the first song and lyric that came to mind way back in December. It's probably one of the easier ones I've come up with and I'm interested to see whether someone can correctly discern the song.
Have at it folks!!
Please head to the comments and let me know whether you’ve figured out this week’s song!!
Very interesting idea! As a professional translator, you may find it of interest to know that what you are proposing to do is actually an "official" translation technique called back translation. Sometimes one has to deviate from the source text and language so as to give the message as much "air" and dynamism in the target language as possible. A good trick (taught at graduate translation courses) is precisely to back translate into the source language to make sure you haven't deviated too much.
I have no idea what your mysterious lyric could be, but can't wait to find out!
This is a fantastic idea, Mark! Lyrics aren’t my strong suit (hence my love for disco, haha), but I’m excited to see the reactions—and the solutions!