Traduction basque de chansons populaires: entre transformation minimale et reparolisation

Resumen

This paper examines the translation of songs by Basque musicians in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of important political and cultural changes in the Basque Country. In the musical field, Basque traditional songs experienced a revival movement: pop groups started to sing foxtrot, rumba, tango or cha-cha-cha in Basque, and Basque songwriters, inspired by different traditions of protest songs, created what has come to be known as the “new Basque song.” Translation was omnipresent in this movement of musical revival. Songs by songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Georges Brassens, Lluis Llach, Leonard Cohen, and Atahualpa Yupanqui, and by pop artists such as Salomé, Cliff Richard, Gigliola Cinquetti, Frank and Nancy Sinatra, and Los Impala, were sung in Basque during this period. A comparison of the original songs and their Basque versions reveals a wide range of translation strategies; while some of the basque versions constitute faithful translations, many of the texts were adapted, manipulated, domesticated, or even completely replaced by new lyrics. The methods used to date to analyze songs do not turn out to be very useful to study song translation into a minority language such as Basque. Based on comparisons between “major” languages, they mainly focus on linguistic aspects, examining translation from a normative, equivalence-oriented point of view. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to offer a model that takes into consideration the cultural, political and social factors that bring about the transformation of songs in the translation process.