Song Translation
“Olga García Barmina, from Riga, has been living in Spain for 20 years. Now she is based in Barcelona. Olga is known in Latvia as a singer and songwriter. Recently she conducted a vast academic research ‘Creation and translation of a multilingual song cycle’ at the Latvian Academy of Culture.”
(Latvian Radio 2)
Academic research and song translation in 6 languages
English, spanish, latvian, french, russian, portuguese (Brazil).
More source languages used through multistage translation method.
Seven Nation Army (Jack White) in French:
Thanks to her multi-cultural background, and openness to discover and learn from our planet’s diversity, Olga Barmina’s passion is to always create bridges between cultures through music and song.
During the years 2021-2022 she conducted a vast academic research on singable song translations at the Latvian Academy of Culture.
What is a singable song translation? It is a translation that transmits the very message of a song lyrics in another language and can be sung to the original tune at the same time.
Making use of Olga’s experience as lyricist, songwriter and singer who actually performs songs, applying Hans Wermer’ skopos theory of translation and Peter Low’s Pentathlon principle, she analyzed the whole process of such translation.
Making use of music notation software, translated into the scores one chant and 11 songs from different cultures, compiling them into a song cycle with insight into gender and human relations.
Additionally, she defined the notions of music and song as such in accordance with her proposed concept of song architectonics.
The research paper “Creation and translation of a multilingual song cycle” has obtained excellent evaluation, being the first full-scale academic research on singable song translations in Latvian and the hard copy of it is available at the library of the Latvian Academy of Culture in Riga, Latvia.
Read the abstract in English, French or Latvian and view the original source songs and their translations in scores: