Resumen de Translation, the ‘Folk Process’, and Socially Committed Songs of the 1960s
Edward Larkey describes a ‘global-local nexus' of dynamic flows and permeable spaces (2003, 149) for languages, cultures, communities and identities to be forged. This study will consider song translations as international products that often effaced their own origins as translations. The scope of investigation is restricted to performance-to-performance translations and adaptations, not only recorded versions but those sung in demonstrations, workers' strikes, and other political gatherings, rather than those that are performance-to-page (liner notes or lyric sheets). Mayoral, Kelly, and Gallardo (1988, 356, qtd. in Pezza Cintrão, 2009) describe non-linguistic meaning systems as potentially creating conditions of constrained translation, though political song lyrics have found channels of unrestraint in cases where new music was found or written for lyrics (e.g. Långbacka) or where old tunes are placed in the service of new lyrical meanings via translation/adaptation. The political songs considered here treat labor relations, pacifism, Civil Rights, gender, and linguistic politics in locally or globally relevant ways, sometimes both. Finally, six transfer processes that characterize these adaptations are typologized.
