Translating Songs

[teo123]

Hey, guys!
Does anybody here have some experience with translating lyrics or other forms of poetry? I've recently attempted to translate Eric Bogle's "The Gift of Years" into Croatian, you can see my work here.
I don't think the result is impressive. I think it's hard to translate poetry from English to Croatian (or vice versa) because equivalent sentences in Croatian tend to have significantly more syllables. English is, at least that's my perception, quite a consonant-heavy language. Almost every syllable in English ends in a consonant. In Croatian, while there are hard-to-pronounce words such as "hrčcima", such are actually rare, and most of the syllables end in a vowel. English is more information-dense because of that, and it must be spoken a lot more slowly than Croatian has to be in order to be understood. That's why, if you try to translate an English poem into Croatian, it either doesn't sound good, or it loses most of its meaning. That's just my perception. I was wondering what you thought about it.

[cornivore]

Godinammit! Why don't they have a word for "the"? You can't even translate the first word of the title... poklon od godinama? Funny thing about it though, you can look up albums by The The in Croatia.

Not to trivialize the idea, I see your translation of "thank you for the gift of years" is "zahvaljujem ti na daru od godina", which was literally defined on wiktionary as thank (zahvaljujem) you (ti) for (na) gift (daru) of (od) year (godina)... "thank you for gift of year".

[teo123]

Godinammit! Why don't they have a word for "the"? You can't even translate the first word of the title... poklon od godinama? Funny thing about it though, you can look up albums by The The in Croatia.

Not to trivialize the idea, I see your translation of "thank you for the gift of years" is "zahvaljujem ti na daru od godina", which was literally defined as thank (zahvaljujem) you (ti) for (na) gift (daru) of (od) year (godina)... "thank you for gift of year".

We don't use "the"/"a", we use different adjective endings instead of that. "Crna čovjeka" means "of a black man", and "crnog čovjeka" means "of the black man". The system is complicated enough to confuse many native speakers.
"The gift of years" can be translated as "dar od godina" or perhaps even as "dar godina".
I am glad somebody is interested in learning a bit of Croatian!

[cornivore]

That's a new one, yeah, I do these kinds of little word search puzzles in different languages occasionally. It's always annoying when the puzzle has a missing piece though. Your translation of the lyrics wasn't annoying, however. I hadn't heard the song before. I was just trying to decipher the title before checking those out, to see if my interpretation would be similar. I usually re-order English words when I write, and search in different orders, but don't usually have a hard time using the word the!

[cornivore]

Well, they did have "the" in Serbo-Croatian, but they say it's used in place of da, for "to", or whatever else da means, because it sounds similar to "the". By the way, when I looked up "the" on Croatian Wikipedia, The Beatles came up. You know what, I never noticed that the spelling of Beatle was a homophone for Beetle. Now I get it, like the beat of a music-al (beat-le, The Beatles)! I was always thinking The Beetles.

Not to trivialize too much, do these lyrics translate into Croatian...

Michelle, ma belle
Sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble
Très bien ensemble

I love you, I love you, I love you
That's all I want to say
Until I find a way
I will say the only words I know that you'll understand ?

[teo123]

Well, they did have "the" in Serbo-Croatian, but they say it's used in place of da, for "to", or whatever else da means, because it sounds similar to "the". By the way, when I looked up "the" on Croatian Wikipedia, The Beatles came up. You know what, I never noticed that the spelling of Beatle was a homophone for Beetle. Now I get it, like the beat of a music-al (beat-le, The Beatles)! I was always thinking The Beetles.

Not to trivialize too much, do these lyrics translate into Croatian...

Michelle, ma belle
Sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble
Très bien ensemble

I love you, I love you, I love you
That's all I want to say
Until I find a way
I will say the only words I know that you'll understand ?

I've never heard somebody use "the" when speaking Croatian. And "da" means "yes" in Croatian, "do" is the Croatian word for "to". Anyway, I don't know if you noticed, in "dar od godina", or "dar godina", or "daru od godina", "godina" is actually plural, it's the genitive plural, it's written the same as nominative singular, but it's pronounced with long 'a' at the end, while the nominative singular is pronounced with a short 'a'.

I assume the French part means (I don't speak French): "Michael, my beautiful, there are words that are beautiful when they are said together, when they are said together.".
So, I've tried to quickly (not poetically) translate it to Croatian:

Mihaela, moja lijepa,
Ima riječi koje idu lijepo zajedno,
Idu lijepo zajedno.

Volim te, volim te, volim te,
To je sve što želim reći
Dok ne nađem način
Da kažem riječi koje znam da ćeš razumjeti.

[cornivore]

It looks about as poetic to me, with all of those accents, good job.

I don't know if you noticed, in "dar od godina", or "dar godina", or "daru od godina", "godina" is actually plural, it's the genitive plural, it's written the same as nominative singular, but it's pronounced with long 'a' at the end, while the nominative singular is pronounced with a short 'a'.

Didn't notice that, just found that godinama was defined as years, and godina as year.

[teo123]

It looks about as poetic to me, with all of those accents, good job.

I didn't mark any accents. 'Č' is a sign for the 'ch' as in "chair" sound. 'Ć' is a sign for a palatal 't', as in "tree". 'Đ' is for palatal 'd', as in "drive". 'Š' is for 'sh' in "ship". 'Ž' is for 's' in "vision".

[cornivore]

That's interesting enough, diacritical marks are they? I was just referring to them as accents artistically. Like, I don't really care if it's poetic, because it looks pretty cool (like calligraphy). So do beetles... is there a word in Croatian for those?

[teo123]

That's interesting enough, diacritical marks are they? I was just referring to them as accents artistically. Like, I don't really care if it's poetic, because it looks pretty cool (like calligraphy). So do beetles... is there a word in Croatian for those?

Beetles are called "bubice" in Croatian.