Churches in many other language communities are not as fortunate. It takes time and resources to develop hymns, which many churches lack. When the Christian faith is initially introduced to a society, or a new church gets started in a community, the church planters often teach the new church members their own songs. If the songs are in a foreign language, then many leaders assume that the lyrics can just be translated into the native language of the worshipers. As we saw in the examples above, this can indeed be done. However, translating a song is not as easy as it appears.
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| Image from trentdejong.com |
Matching the syllables of lyrics with the notes of a tune can be very tricky. For instance, many Welsh hymns (other than Guide Me) have never made it into English in spite of the close relationship between speakers of both languages. Welsh poetry has certain features that make translation difficult: words are repeated often, and the syllables are structured in a way that not many melodies can fit.
We encountered these same difficulties during our time in the Philippines. English has many one-syllable words, but Filipino languages tend to have much longer ones. For instance, "faith" in English is mananampalataya in Tagalog. (That's seven syllables, in case you are counting.) So a hymn or chorus in Tagalog would need many notes to translate a word that would take just one note in an English song.
Besides the difficulties of matching notes and syllables, there are other difficulties in translating songs from one language to another. Tunes themselves carry meaning, and hearers can have emotional reactions to a melody that don't fit with the message of the lyrics. One missionary shared with me a striking story about mixed messages in hymns. After she had been working with her churches for some time, she started asking the worshipers how they felt about their hymns, most of which were translations from English songs. She found that about 1 out of 3 songs actually sounded like funeral dirges to the people who sang them. Songs like Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee! Even though someone had struggled to fit the original English words into the people's language, the meanings of the songs were not coming through clearly.
On Sunday when you sing together in your worship service, take a minute to consider if you can understand the words. You probably do, and you take that for granted. Not every church in the world has that privilege.
I live in Poland where we are inundated by many translations from English, often many translations of one song, some better, some worse. Most people don't bother getting copyright permission, just hear a great song and think it should be translated. There is a problem with lack of distribution possibilities (though youtube is helping there). People from different churches come together to sing songs and can't sing together because they don't have the same words (or sometimes even rhythms). There is also a problem with trans-accentuation between English and Polish. Main accents fall in different places and often what fits English just doesn't work in Polish. (Polish is at least a little more flexible in word order so a creative translator can sometimes make things work.) Polish, like Tagalog often has words with more syllables, making it hard to fit the new words to the music without adding extra notes. (Today's syncopated choruses seem much harder to translate well than hymns with their usually straight rhythms.) Two of the biggest problems however are a lack of understanding of poetic language and theology. Poetry is obviously more difficult to interpret and translate, requiring good knowledge of both languages, not just doing word for word translations (or making up something completely different if the translator doesn't "get it".) Lack of theological understanding and context can lead to changing or undermining the theological content and aim of the song. (Assuming it had some to start with - sometimes songs are translated because they have a great tune, even though there isn't much content to the text.) There is also a tendency to regard "homegrown" worship music as not so good as imported songs. Hopefully that will change but it will probably take a long time.
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