Lost in Translation Vol. 20 REVEALED

The final installment of Lost in Translation brings a tough challenge, but once again the midweek hint helps an avid reader and researcher discern the correct lyric and song.

Happy Sunday folks! It’s a grey and gloomy day in the Yorkshire Dales, the type of day that perfectly matches my mood of late. At the beginning of last week, Tina and I completed a wonderful and challenging circular walk, taking in the summit of Whernside, Yorkshire’s highest mountain, and wrapping up at the spectacular Yordas Cave. While the vast majority of the walk wasn’t overly challenging, a stretch near the beginning included a steep climb requiring a hand-over-hand ascent on a grassy slope with only tufts of grass for purchase. In hindsight, this turned out to be a little too much for my body as I could hardly walk the following morning due to excruciating pain my left heel.

Long story short, I haven’t been able to walk for close to two weeks now and, perhaps understandably, my mental health has declined somewhat as a result. My fears were confirmed at the foot clinic on Thursday with a diagnosis of plantar fasciitis, likely precipitated by that sharp ascent and the resulting stress placed on my calf, Achilles tendon and plantar fascia. While that might seem like a downer, it does at least come with an action plan that allows me to get out of my head and get into the solution. I’ve now been doing my rehab exercises for a few days and tomorrow morning I’ll head to the gym for some low-impact cardio and strength training. After ten or twelve days spent moping and feeling sorry for myself, I’m ready to turn the corner and begin working myself back into walking shape again.

Over the course of the last decade, faced with what feels like a continuing stream of tweaks, tears, strains and other injuries requiring rehab (getting old kinda sucks sometimes), I adopted an informal theme song that I lean into for motivation. To be clear, it’s not a song I ever actually play out loud. Quite often it’ll just start playing over and over in my mind when I’m working my way through a last set of painful stretches or core work (“trying hard now, it’s so hard now”). And sometimes I’ll even start singing it aloud (“getting strong now, won’t be long now”), although that’s more of a running joke between myself and my wife. Weird? A little. Useful? Certainly! Anything that provides a bit of levity, while also adding motivation, works for me.

The song? It’s “Gonna Fly Now” by Bill Conti, originally written for the 1976 film Rocky. But the version that plays in my mind is from 1982’s Rocky III, the disco influenced rendition which soundtracks the training montage of Rocky working with Apollo Creed and his team, in the ring, in the gym, and on the beach. By the end of the song, when Rocky is finally in tip top shape and actually beating Apollo in a footrace on the beach, you just know he’s gonna go in and kick Clubber Lang’s ass in the rematch. When I was a kid, I couldn’t get enough of this movie. No lie, 11-year-old Mark rented the movie, and watched it so many times (over 75), that I probably should’ve owned shares in the little video rental place in our neighborhood!!

So here’s to “getting stronger”, so I can be back out in the hills soon! If any of my readers have dealt with plantar fasciitis in the past, I’d welcome any input, advice, or suggestions you may have.

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And now what you’ve been waiting for! It’s time to provide the answer to Monday’s Lost in Translation.

The Translated Lyric

Here’s the lyric I provided:

I don't think anyone in my family tree is like that.

So, they're definitely tall or short.

So you can't change that. But that's okay.

So I don't think it's a bad thing.

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The Original Lyric

And here’s the original lyric as it was before being passed through half a dozen languages:

No one, I think, is in my tree

I mean, it must be high or low

That is, you can't, you know, tune in, but it's all right

That is, I think it's not too bad

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The Song

Over the course of Lost in Translation, I’ve put hundreds of songs through the translation algorithm and ultimately managed to come up with a couple dozen decent challenges, twenty of which made their way into the series. Last weekend, when I hit the final translate button (from Traditional Chinese back into English) I thought I’d managed to create the toughest challenge of the entire series so far. Given that I’d kicked off the series with a Beatles track, I’d decided that it would be fitting to come full circle and close with a track by the Fab Four. Once I was ready with the challenge, I called in my resident Beatles expert (my wife Tina is one of the biggest fans I know) and showed her the translated lyric. Nothing. For several minutes she hummed and hawed, sang a few snippets from songs, wandered away to think about it some more, and ultimately conceded defeat. But the minute I started reading the untranslated lyric, before I’d even made it to the second line, she had named the correct song. It was, indeed, a good and fitting challenge for the series finale.

After posting the challenge on Monday, along with a rather vague clue (“This late 60s rock song made the top twenty in more than ten countries, seeing particular success in Continental Europe, where it made the top five in five countries, including three number ones.”) there was very little activity in the comments and no correct guesses. When it came time to provide the midweek hint, I decided to actually provide the band name and let the chips fall where they may.

Ultimately, it was long time reader and friend of Joy in the Journey, Andy of The Vinyl Room fame, that came back with the correct lyric and song: “Strawberry Fields Forever” by The Beatles (the double A-side with “Penny Lane”).

“So how did you get there and how long did it take you?” was my question, and here’s what Andy came back with:

I think what helped me the most was my language research skills. When I saw your hint this morning, I went down the rabbit hole of trying to find a list of their continental Europe top 5 songs but it was a mess as you can imagine. That took me twenty minutes and led me nowhere 😅

I didn’t think about it for the rest of the day. Just now, on a cigarette break, I was curious to see if I could get it from the language side (which is what I should have done in the first place). I googled “Beatles songs with the word family tree”: nothing. “Beatles songs with the word genealogy”: nothing per se but potential rabbit hole with family topics. So I then decided to simplify “Beatles songs with the word tree”. Only one, according to Google, and a late 60s one, so I thought it must be the one. I skimmed through the lyrics and… voilà! 😅

Amazing!! Congratulations again to Andy who notched his third correct guess in the series. And congrats to Kevin Alexander of On Repeat Records who amassed an incredible seven correct guesses over the course of this series. This post brings the Lost in Translation series to an end, although perhaps not permanently as I can envision a “season two” eventually rolling around. Thanks to everyone who tuned in every week and who stayed engaged in the comments with guesses and friendly banter!

Here’s the music video for this week’s song, cued up at the start of the lyric:

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Feel free to jump into the comments with your thoughts:

• How did you do? Were you close? Or completely stumped?

• Did you know this song already?

• Would you have been able to name the song from the original lyrics?