Prace komisji nauk.pdf - Instytut Filologii Angielskiej Uniwersytetu ...

text. The case of altering versions of one text can be found in music. Live
performances often provide different versions of one song not only in terms of its
typically musical aspects (e.g. different pace, phrasing, declamation) but also on the
textual level (e.g. changes in the order of events in a song, replacing one image
with another, increasing the number of lines in a verse or shortening it). As a result,
there can be numerous accounts of the same song which differ substantially
between one another. Here, a translator is faced with the task of adopting a proper
strategy for translating such lyrics—they must decide whether all or some of the
live versions of a song should be considered or just a chosen one. And again, what
criteria should be adopted for choosing the one(s).
Since accounting for all the interpretations is simply impossible, the majority
of the Polish translators who translate such lyrics adhere to the studio versions of
his song (e.g. Porzuczek 2008, Talarczyk 2007). However, Kołakowski (2007)
claims that various live performances create numerous opportunities to abate the
already restrained act of song translation, e.g. by changing the location of particular
lines in a song when their order is altered in a live performance or by using images
which do not occur in the album version of a song. Furthermore, he adds that a
translator may not only make use of different live versions but also of other factors
accompanying a live performance (e.g. the singer’s behaviour on stage). They may
serve as a tool for better interpretation of the text.
Presented in this way, song translation is seen in a different light. It combines
the strictly textual factors with the extratextual ones as a consequence of
amalgamating text and music with performance art. It involves a great deal of
creativity but also brings the risk of misinterpretation. A different matter is the
autonomy of the target text. For instance, in the case of poetry translation, a
translator’s task is to produce a text that will function as a poem on its own in the
target culture (Raffel 1988: 124; Conolly 1998: 171). From the viewpoint of
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