Song titles translations in non-latin script languages
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Song titles translations in non-latin script languages
I'm wondering if someone knows how do they translate famous song titles into languages which are not using latin script, like Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Hindi etc. I wanted to translate some song titles into Hindi, and I figured out that whichever way I translate it, it seems that I cant find all of the titles translated in the same manner on Hindi google. Some of them are transliterated, but for some of them I cant find even in transliterated version on Google, no matter how famous they are. So it would be helpful if someone can tell me what do they do with song titles in those languages, how do they write it? Do they transliterate it and turn each english character into their characters, or they just translate it literally, or they write song names in latin script, although they write everything else in their own script? Thanks
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Re: Song titles translations in non-latin script languages
vsnlap wrote:...famous song titles...
I find Wikipedia is a good way to pin down proper names of people, places, films, and the like in foreign languages. I'm sure you could try it for songs, too.
A lot of popular songs have their own Wikipedia entries (or are listed in articles about the writers/performers/etc.) which are, in turn, often available in other languages. Find a page with the song's title in it, then click on the 'languages' icon to access the drop-down menu with available languages listed. It's a hit-and-miss solution, but it can work.
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Re: Song titles translations in non-latin script languages
In Russian we just normally write the original song's name in Latin script. Other conventions (like translation, etc.) just don't seem right to me, although they aren't non-existent (for example, the Russian encyclopedia Krugosvet translates the name of the song into Russian and then adds the original untransliterated name in brackets).
Of course, in informal writing we can find transliterations, translations and, in a certain sense, nicknames for songs (like "Шизгара" from the misheard "She's got it" lyric of the song Venus by Shocking Blue).
Of course, in informal writing we can find transliterations, translations and, in a certain sense, nicknames for songs (like "Шизгара" from the misheard "She's got it" lyric of the song Venus by Shocking Blue).
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Re: Song titles translations in non-latin script languages
With Hindi in particular it's often hard to find even Bollywood movie songs in Devanagari on the Internet, so I'm not at all surprised that translating the names of famous foreign songs or transliterating them into Devanagari is pretty rare. Doesn't help that Hindi is pretty badly underrepresented online in the first place, for a language of its size.
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