Prosody, Semantics and Style. On the Hierarchy of Levels of Equivalence in the Translation of Cabaret Songs (Case Study: Polish Versions of Fred Ebb's Money…)
The article is a case study and contains a comparative analysis of four variants of the Polish translation of Fred Ebb and John Kander’s song Money… from the musical “Cabaret”. The author of the translation is Wojciech Młynarski, one of the most respected Polish songwriters of the second half of the twentieth century. In the study, an assumption is made that Młynarski, who repeatedly changed versions of his translation, sought to create the most faithful rendition of the songs from the musical for the needs of the Polish stage. His efforts can be observed at four levels of text organization. The translator aimed mainly for sound equivalence, i.e. conformity with the original song in terms of rhythm (word stress), rhyme (consonance) and voice instrumentation and, to a lesser extent, sound imitation. He also cared about pragmatic equivalence by rendering into Polish the original intentions, with particular emphasis on the modes of indirect communication, such as irony and satire. However, other aspects of equivalence remained in the background. Not everywhere the translator managed to keep the cognitive equivalence, i.e. convergence of imagery, by translating scenes and scenarios that were part of cultural knowledge into parallel ones and, more broadly, by trying to evoke similar images in the mind of the reader and listener. His efforts to achieve the effect of broadly understood stylistic equivalence were also noteworthy; only to a small extent they consisted in giving the right stylistic coloring to the individual lexical items which had their English equivalents, and they mainly boiled down to translating stylistic games that did not necessarily cover the same fragments of the song, though were usually based on the same mechanism (a clash between low and high style, absurdity). The analysis shows that the translator adopted tabular rather than linear approach to the original.
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