In this Master’s thesis, I will examine the audio-visual translations of the songs performed in the Walt Disney animation Frozen. The movie offers the watcher two translations of the movie in Finnish, which are subtitles and dubbed language. My aim is to compare the two song translations to each other and to the source language and analyse the translations through the perspective of music and its’ characteristics. In my research I have two hypotheses. My first hypothesis is that the subtitle translations follow well the meaning of the source language, but they are not singable. Furthermore, my second hypothesis is that the dubbed versions of the songs are more singable, but they do not follow the source text as carefully as …show more content…
I will analyse the original soundtrack as well as both the Finnish subtitles of the song lyrics as well as the translations dubbed into Finnish. In this preliminary report, I will be analysing four songs presented in the beginning of the film; The frozen heart (fin: Jääsydän), Do you want to build a snowman (fin: Lumiukko tehtäisiinkös?), For the first time in forever (fin: Ensi kertaa ikuisuuksiin) and Love is an open door (fin: Ovi nyt auki on). I will first gather the original song lyrics as well as the translations. The song lyrics and translations are gathered from the Frozen – Huurteinen seikkailu Blu-ray disc published by Walt Disney in April 2014. (DVDPlaza 2014) Then for the use of song lyric analysis I will be using back-to-back-translations to show the differences in the translations compared to the original English soundtrack. The musical performance Vuelie presented during the opening credits of the film is not included in this thesis as although it is the main theme of the film, it does not use English lyrics and therefore, is not translated into …show more content…
Low’s theory consists of five different criteria, which are rhythm, rhyme, sense, naturalness and singability. Here I will be analysing carefully all the different aspects and how they affect the singability of the translations.
Furthermore, to find out what kind of translation method there has been used to translate the song lyrics I will be using Johan Franzon’s pseudotranslation theory, which includes three different methods of making song lyric translations: re-creation, hook-translation and reverent translation.
I will use in my research both quantitative and qualitative methods. I will first gather my material from the Blu-ray disc and then make a table of each song where I will have the original song lyrics, subtitled translation and the dubbed translation. In order to analyze the sense and the naturalness, I will also use back-to-back-translations of the subtitles and dub. I will also use as a data collecting method, song lyrics and song lyric translations of Frozen found from the internet to make the data collecting faster. The text found from the Internet will be checked from the Blu-ray to see that they are the same. I will not use in the analysis words and sentences that are spoken in the middle of the song, as they are not considered singing.