Some Reflections on the Translatability of Christmas Carols and Christmas Poems

Abstract

The aim of the following paper is to identify and analyze some of the challenges we face when translating Christmas carols and poems from Romanian into Spanish and vice versa. Translating poetry and especially Christmas carols is not an easy task because, in addition to a good knowledge of the source and target languages, it requires a vast knowledge of both Spanish and Romanian cultures. Even though they are Romance languages and Christianity (with its two variants, Orthodox and Catholic) is the official religion of Romania and Spain, lexical and cultural particularities can be identified in the texts, since it uses a specific language. This is not to say that there are no cultural similarities regarding the interpretation of the birth of Christ. There are several similarities in terms of action and biblical characters, which are reflected in both Romanian and Spanish versions. Our aim is to see how far we can go with the translation of Christmas carols and poems, whether the translated text maintains the original message or not and to try to see if it is possible to preserve, in some cases the rhyme, or at least partially. The corpus we will use in our research comprises 24 Romanian Christmas carols and 13 Romanian poems translated into Spanish and 21 Spanish Christmas carols, as well as 13 Spanish poems translated into Romanian. These texts were translated by the students of Applied Modern Languages during a practical translation course, the final variant including our suggestions and revisions.