(This post is only tangentially linguistically
themed.)
So, I´ve been a big fan of Idina Menzel and her voice for a long time--since I discovered her, and RENT--probably around the year 2000.
To me, she´s always been a big star, being discovered
in RENT and then being part of the smash Broadway hit Wicked, I thought for
sure she was a household name. Turns out, boy was I wrong. Among
musical theatre fans, sure, they all know her--but around the average Joe Blow,
not at all. Not until the Disney movie Frozen, anyway!
It seems she doesn´t even think of herself as a big
star, even now. This is crazy to me because as far as Broadway goes, I
think there´s very little room for her to get bigger in fame than she already
is/was before Frozen. I follow her on social media, and she seems to be
the average cute girl next door--with a job that she loves and precious kids and
she´s going through a divorce, it´s really sad, and OHMYGAHD she was invited to
sing at the Oscars and she was freaking out! Continuously posting about
how nervous1 she was
about this! I couldn´t believe it! Her job—which she is arguably
one of the best in the world at—is performing perfectly live on stage in front
of audiences night after night. How could she possibly be nervous about
the Oscars?! She does this all the time, without the help of autotune or
time zone corrections *cough* *Mariah Carey* *cough*
Well, the infamous Adele Dazeem thing happened,
and I think she sang well, but it wasn´t her best performance. We´re all
friends here, we can admit it. It was just okay. You could tell she
was a nervous wreck, poor baby! I do really love her performance with
Jimmy Fallon and his gang--her voice is so beautiful and in this one, she´s
clearly having fun--and I feel like this is what she sounds like when she´s
just singing around the house, playing with her kids. If she were just
singing around the house, and I were there, I´d be like, "damn, girl.
You sing real good… wow, yeah."
Now, I know this Let It Go song from Frozen has been
covered and parodied 10,000 times.2 And there are countless things
on the internet about how kids around the world won´t stop singing this song,
thereby driving their parents mad. If you´re one of those parents, well,
then, I guess you should have stopped reading this post by now. I´m not
one of those parents and I´m not sick of this song yet. I still love
it. I think the writers intentionally made it sound like Stephen Schwartz
because they realized Wicked-style-music sounds really lovely in Idina´s tone
and register.
Here she is singing Defying Gravity from Wicked and
her voice is so beauuuuuutiful.
Tonight I was catching up on The Voice with my mom and
this contestant girl sang Let It Go, and didn´t do a very good job.3
It´s understandable! It´s a hard song to sing! I started Googling
around and stumbled upon this video Disney put together of all the languages
this movie has been translated into.
I, of course, really love it.
I´ve since read that this movie was translated into 41
different languages and unlike Avril Lavigne (read my rant about her
here), obviously Disney has the money to actually translate this thing
properly. It´s a huge task, but of course Disney has every reason to want
their blockbuster to be perfect all around the world. Well, I´ve decided I
want to work for their team. This article4 in the LA Times says that back in the
day, high budget translation wasn´t that big of a deal—for instance, Lion King
was only translated into 15 languages, and Tarzan only 5, and all the songs
recorded by Phil Collins himself! I´ll
have to look into these for a later post, of course.
Here´s what I know.
There´s this man named Rick Dempsey whose title is “Senior Vice
President of Creative for Disney Character Voices International.” It´s
basically his job to “internationalize” Disney movies. He has 76 people
around the world in 19 offices who oversee movies in 55 languages, according to
this article.5 Yes, I want him to hire me. They
translated Frozen into 41 languages (even though the video above only shows 25
of them—I know you were counting).
One of my few dream jobs (along with being a singer
for Cirque du Soleil) is to be a full time translator, but I´d like to
translate novels. I´ve never been good
at rhyming or making songs in English—I´m sure I´d be no good at it in any
other language, either. I´ve done a bit
of poetry translation, and man, it´s mentally exhausting. The
translation can really make or break a work´s success. I´ve seen good translations of musicals in
Mexico, but I´ve also seen it go badly.
As an aside: There´s this musical I saw in Vegas along time ago called Notre Dame de Paris.
Well, it was lovely. It was
translated all over the world, and seriously, according to the Guinness Book of
World records, had the most successful first year of any musical ever (it
debuted in 1998). Despite this, in the
US the critics destroyed it in the press, mostly due to its poor translation
from the original French—and soon thereafter it went under. It was translated for Canada, Belgium,
Russia, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Japan, China, South Korea, Haiti, Taiwan,
Singapore and Lebanon. Some popular
songs from the show, have also been translated into Belarusian, Catalan, Czech,
German, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Dutch and English. But the English translation was so bad that
it only played in the US for less than two years. Andw has a DVD of the stage production in the
original French and, oh how we treasure it.
I still enjoy watching it, and the soundtrack is one of my favorites.
Khya and I used to translate pop songs from English
into other languages in high school for fun, but we… took a lot of artistic
liberties. That is, we didn´t do a very
good job, but it was fun. Andw and I
have talked about creating a new translation for Notre Dame for years, but
haven´t gotten around to it. Maybe one
day we´ll do it.
Anyway. I can
hardly imagine how hard it is to translate a text such as an animated movie and
convert its idioms to a local understanding, keeping the essence of the story the
same, and making songs still rhyme, too, and have the lips match up! The
actors’ and animations’ lip movements, body language and what’s on screen at
the time all kind of have to match. I
know this is done all the time, but that doesn´t make the task any less
difficult. Sounds like the most exciting
of challenges.
But hold on, Disney even went so far as to find
singers whose voices sounded like Idina´s. Part of Dempsey’s job is to find a singer
with similar qualities to the actor’s voice in each country.
Watching the multilingual version of ‘Let it Go’, you
can see how fantastically both the voices and the words have been matched up
with the original animation, and how the singers have been picked to match the
character and to sound as similar as possible to the English voice. They did a good job!
I was a little surprised to find
out what the 41 languages are, that Disney considers to be key. Among
them, 3 versions for China: Cantonese, and two different Mandarin versions
(Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China). The Mandarin dubs for Taiwan and
Mainland China are translated and dubbed by separate teams; they have different
voice actors, different accents and different dialogue. Even the lyrics for the
songs are different, as you can see in this post. Disney takes a similar approach with French and
French Canadian, and Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. There are 3 Spanish versions,too. One is for Latin America, and Spanish
speaking Americans, another for Spain, and a third for South America. Ha!
In an NPR interview6, Dempsey was asked if
some languages were harder to translate to than others. He responded, “You know, certainly your
territories where they have dubbed for many years are going to be easier -
like, in France. But we have some new languages; like, Vietnamese is a fairly
new language for us to dub in. We did Malay Bahasa, and that's a new language
for us. So there's always going to be challenges when you're opening up a new
market and dubbing there for the first or second time.”
That´s how you know they had a big budget, hahaha. Growing up watching cartoons dubbed in Spanish all the time, I´ve seen some really shoddy translation jobs, and some very obviously not Mexican, even if the cartoon was being sold in Mexico.
Lastly, I came across this list—someone else´s opinion
of the top 10 best non-English versions of Let It Go. Yep, I´m still not tired of it.
1 http://instagram.com/p/lDe6dxrmZH/ and http://instagram.com/p/lD2FpgLmQI/ and http://instagram.com/p/lGgjmKLmdw/
2 This is one of my
personal favorites http://youtu.be/2bVAoVlFYf0
3 comments:
Each functional unit was coded as L1(English),L2(French) or mix(both languages).The results showed that the majority of the reasons for L1 and L2 use was academic based rather than social or management. Like Murhey and Sasaki,Turnbull also discusses the limitations of his study. He points out that semi-structured interwiews with the teachers about their used of French and Professional translation English would have enhanced the reliability of the data analysis
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