The idea that translation could take place between sign systems other than the verbal was first mooted by Roman Jakobson in 1959, but, for reasons that had largely to do with the intellectual climate and a tendency towards disciplinary over-specialization, it took some time for the concept to be applied to music. However, in recent years, a number of works have appeared that include not only theoretical (Desblache 2019, Grajter 2024) and cultural (Susam-Sarajevo 2015) reflections about the relation between translation and music, but also case studies of intersemiotic translations between music and other arts, such as the chapters by Minors, Stones and Moss in Helen Minors’ Music, Text and Translation (2013), and by Ng, Takebee and Vidal in Şerban & Chan’s Opera in Translation (2020), or Bennett in Campbell and Vidal’s The Experience of Translation (2024). Sign-singing, or ‘embodied songs’, aimed primarily at the deaf and hard of hearing, is another form of intersemiotic translation that is now attracting scholarly attention (Maler 2013, Fisher 2021), while multilingual hiphop has also been approached from a translational perspective (Taviano 2019).
Not all translational activity involving music is intersemiotic, of course. A great deal of conventional interlingual translation takes place in musical contexts, such as when Italian opera, American musicals or indeed pop songs are performed in other languages or included in films which are then subtitled or dubbed for export. In the first case, the music itself will act as a powerful constraint on the translation, as songs performed in other languages have above all to be singable, as well as respecting rhythmic and melodic structures (Low 2017; Apter & Herman 2016). In the second, the constraints are more of a technical nature, such as the spatial and temporal limits or lip-synchronization common to other forms of audiovisual translation (Rędzioch-Korkuz 2016).
Finally, the concept of translationality, developed first in the field of medicine and brought to the attention of translation scholars by Robinson (2017) and especially Blumczynski (2023), offers remarkable potential for exploring how musical themes and genres are transported through time and space (see Bennett forthcoming, also Vidal Claramonte 2017).
This special issue of Translation Matters aims to contribute to these ongoing conversations by exploring all aspects of musical translation, whether intersemiotic, interlingual, experiential or other. Hence, proposals are invited on topics such as:
- Song translation
- Opera subtitling and surtitling
- Translation for musical films and animations
- Sign-singing and embodied song for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Intersemiotic translation to/from music
- Linguistic hybridity in musical contexts
- Translation in ethnomusicology
- Interlingual translation on musical themes
- Translationality in music
