Apr 25
People of the world unite?!
Written by Nimrod on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Filed under:-mini-posts | Tags:language, music
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Filed under:-mini-posts | Tags:language, music
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Here is a light topic. Since last year’s parody song “Say a word in heart”, singing songs in a foreign language — if you can call it that — has been raised to a totally new level. You’ve probably even heard the stomach-churning subsequent parodies of “Shanghai beach”, “Spicy girl”, and even the Peking Opera standard “Su san qi jie”, but alas this genre has mercifully run its short course.
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On the other hand, there are more serious foreign language translations of songs, too. Just today, I discovered really nice versions of translated national anthems. Most anthems tend to be specific to a national consciousness, metrically prosidic, and so difficult to convey well in a different language context, but these two versions are quite good, I thought! What say you?
Here’s one of the American anthem sung in Chinese by some Youtube expat:
while here is a quite touching rendition of the Chinese anthem “March of the volunteers” translated to English sung by Paul Robeson
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April 25th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Thanks for posting this. Great singing from both of them. And I learned something more about Paul Robeson 🙂 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson
April 25th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
The last time when I heard Star Spangled Banner was sung that bad was by Roseanne Barr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrFW2aYHVR8
April 26th, 2009 at 12:48 am
Right, when I say good, I wasn’t referring to the singing… If you go by singing “Say a word in heart” can even be considered professional.