Cover of Between Words and Sounds

Book

Between Words and Sounds

Cultural Misunderstanding in Literary and Song Translation

By Meghann Cassidy, Stephanie Schwerter, Charles Ivan Armstrong, Chen Hung-Shu, Johann Franzon, Annjo Greenall, Paul Grundy, Britta C. Jung, Marie Karas-Delcourt, Miao Li, Jean-Charles Meunier, Anna R?dzioch-Korkuz, Christopher Rollason, Irina Siseykina, Nils-Christian Terp, Laurence Chamlou

Published by ibidem Press · 2025

  • Academic

Where to buy

About this book

This volume’s aim is to shed new light on cultural misunderstanding, examining both the obstacles and outcomes it can entail. In the field of literary and song translation in particular, cultural misunderstanding can engender compound and wide-ranging effects. Occurrences can lead to ambiguity, the distortion of source texts or the spread of false or potentially harmful cultural images. Still, these misunderstandings can also be fruitful, dynamic phenomena with highly creative potential. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the volume’s chapters navigate thorny yet fertile instances of cultural misunderstanding, including song translation for Polish national television, the “exportation” of anglophone pop songs to Germany and France, Bob Dylan in French, Spanish, or Portuguese, Rimbaud’s poems translated into Norwegian, American Broadway musicals staged in Chinese, or the translation of Iranian novels into French. The volume’s contributors approach their subject matter from different academic backgrounds in music, literature, translation studies and linguistics.

More from ibidem Press
View all books