12.7.07

Quadralingual Vinyl

I stumbled across a record by somebody called Sándor Fehér and his Gipsy (sic) band. My taste for such music aside, I was intrigued by the reverse which featured liner notes in four languages. The first I figure to be Hungarian, then English, then it looked like German, and Russian. Such tidbits are always fun to glance through, but there are things that jump out at me, suggesting that the translations were not carefully executed efforts, but rather hastily done to get it done. An obvious example was the second song of side B, is titled "Were Do You Fly Swallow?"

Now, I'll admit, I didn't catch the spelling error the first time around. I was focusing on the fact that it was the only one of the four versions to feature a question mark. I initially thought that maybe this was a pressing done where English was the base of the notes, and they were expanded to the other languages, putting Hungarian first to seem authentic. After all, the obverse of the record does feature the title as it is written in English.

When I saw the spelling error, I was still about to write it off, but then I noticed that there was another title that was a question, but no question marks on any of the versions. I can't really do too in depth of an analysis, but it does seem to be that the translations were done from the Hungarian, but possibly there was a bit of poetic license and or judgement calls on the part of the translators, since there are a few oddball quirks.

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