Lost in translation : why song titles differ in meaning in English and Chinese

Abstract

This paper investigated the titles of Mandarin pop (Mandopop) songs released in the last two years, as well as their corresponding English titles in order to identify the plausible naming patterns in the process of translation. These song titles created the database instrumental to this study, which were gathered from the top 100 songs in terms of popularity in 2017 and 2018 among listeners of Singapore’s top Chinese radio station, YES 933FM. Preliminary results suggests that there were five main categories of naming trends during the translation of the song titles from Chinese to English: the retention of meaning, narrowing of meaning, a question that turns into positive statement, relational meaning, as well as titles with completely different meanings. Thereafter, it was postulated that the factors influencing the categorization of the song titles included increasing accessibility of the songs to non-Chinese language users, prioritizing the cadences of the translated titles, as well as the themes and emotions conveyed in the songs. In addition, this paper provided some insights into intentions behind the exclusion of translated titles, as well as a diachronic comparison of translated song titles in the past two decades.