《月亮代表我的心》 is a very lovely song. People have translated the lyrics of it into English to a poem or poem like structure. What I did here is to translate Chinese lyrics to English lyrics, which means that the words in English is signable to the original music.
I am able to do this partially because that the Chinese lyrics of this song are relatively simple. For many songs it is very difficult to do this type of translation. An example is the lyrics from 李叔同的《送別》。 To make the translation of “天之涯，地之角， 知交半零落，一觚濁酒盡餘歡, 今宵別夢寒“ singable to the original music without loosing significant amount of information is almost imposible. Even for 《月亮代表我的心》 the difficulty is still there. The major one is to properly translate the song title ‘月亮代表我的心’.
People translate this to “The moon represents my heart”. English speaking people do not understand the translation. The word ‘represent’ has very narrow meaning in English. It is often used in connection with the legal process. You can say “My lawyer will represent me in this case.” Another situation can be seen in “This represents the topline products from this company.” We Chinese attach a lot of meanings to word “代表” in this particular context, which are not in the meaning of English word “represent”.
For this reason I translate the song title to “The moon shines on my heart”. What does this mean? It’s hard to explain. But I can also ask what does “月亮代表我的心” mean? It is not easy to answer either even using our mother tongue! So basically I translated something blur to something that is also blur or fussy, which gives readers rooms for imagination. I think this should be allowed and it may be a technique that we should use in some translations.
Below is my translation.
| 月亮代表我的心 你問我愛你有多深， 我愛你有幾分？ 我的情也真，我的愛也真， 月亮代表我的心。 你問我愛你有多深， 我愛你有幾分？ 我的情不移，我的愛不變， 月亮代表我的心。 輕輕的一個吻， 已經打動我的心， 深深的一段情， 教我思念到如今。 你問我愛你有多深， 我愛你有幾分？ 你去想一想，你去看一看， 月亮代表我的心。 |
The Moon Shines on My Heart You've asked how deep I loved you, How much I missed you? My love is dear, My love is clear, The moon shines on my heart. You've asked how deep I loved you, How much I missed you? My heart is true, My heart is loyal, The moon shines on my heart. So gentle a kiss it was, Already touched my soul, So briefly we were together, The sweetness lingering forever. You've asked how deep I loved you, How much I missed you? You'll know when you think, you'll know when you look, The moon shines on my heart. |
Here is a MP3 record of my singing to simply demonstrate that people can sing this song using the English lyrics that I put forth.
As many translations the original meaning may become weakened in my translation and so may the richness of the love feeling do. Translation is to help information flow between languages but with the existence of the language and cultural barriers we oftentimes fit a small caliber tube to a big caliber tube, which causes the information flows out significantly less in volume.
I wish people make suggestions so I can improve this translations.
If you have read through this article up to this point you really deserve to enjoy the song sang by 鄧麗君。 So click to star.
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