Even though the study of specific problems might me helpfull in your translation as we tried in our latest post, we need to read more than just a few sentences in order to get a feeling for the content we want to translate, it’s meaning and the way of expressing it.
Therefore, let’s give a look into an example of a music theory text: an analysis of the piece Cathedrale Engloutie from Claude Debussy. In the box below you can find this text in all three languages:
At the first skim we can see that they look very similar and there is seemingly not that many terminology that could get us into trouble. But if we take a dive further into it, we can tell that the problem is rather in which of the polysemic words will change into something completely different. For example, the same polysemic spanish word pedal does not refer at all to the sustain pedal from the piano, but to a composition tecnique, whereas it needs to be translated as:
- Bordune (GER).
- Drones (EN).
Another example would be the spanish word registro. In this word has not any of the meanings you would find, for example, in the RAE dictionary (see entry 17.m and 18.m). It is not a division of a scale and it does not refer to the human voice either. It refers to the range from the deepest and highest note played in the musical piece. Therefore, we have used the following translations:
- Reichweite (GER).
- Range (EN).