Hey, guys!
Does anybody here have some experience with translating lyrics or other forms of poetry? I've recently attempted to translate Eric Bogle's "The Gift of Years" into Croatian, you can see my work here.
I don't think the result is impressive. I think it's hard to translate poetry from English to Croatian (or vice versa) because equivalent sentences in Croatian tend to have significantly more syllables. English is, at least that's my perception, quite a consonant-heavy language. Almost every syllable in English ends in a consonant. In Croatian, while there are hard-to-pronounce words such as "hrčcima", such are actually rare, and most of the syllables end in a vowel. English is more information-dense because of that, and it must be spoken a lot more slowly than Croatian has to be in order to be understood. That's why, if you try to translate an English poem into Croatian, it either doesn't sound good, or it loses most of its meaning. That's just my perception. I was wondering what you thought about it.
Does anybody here have some experience with translating lyrics or other forms of poetry? I've recently attempted to translate Eric Bogle's "The Gift of Years" into Croatian, you can see my work here.
I don't think the result is impressive. I think it's hard to translate poetry from English to Croatian (or vice versa) because equivalent sentences in Croatian tend to have significantly more syllables. English is, at least that's my perception, quite a consonant-heavy language. Almost every syllable in English ends in a consonant. In Croatian, while there are hard-to-pronounce words such as "hrčcima", such are actually rare, and most of the syllables end in a vowel. English is more information-dense because of that, and it must be spoken a lot more slowly than Croatian has to be in order to be understood. That's why, if you try to translate an English poem into Croatian, it either doesn't sound good, or it loses most of its meaning. That's just my perception. I was wondering what you thought about it.
