Translating poetic songs: An attempt at a functional account of strategies

Poems have often been turned into songs, notably as German Lieder. Classical singers use translations of these in several different ways: as cribs for themselves, in printed programmes for their audiences, as singable versions, etc. Since no single target-text is ideal for all of these purposes, the Skopostheorie of Hans J. Vermeer may help translators to match their strategy with the particular skopos (“goal or purpose”) of their translation. The author identifies five specific functions which a song-translation may serve, and proposes a range of five translation strategies intended to match these particular skopoi. A demonstration is given of how these strategies produce different English versions of a few lines from a Baudelaire poem.