2011-06-06

Translation Notes: Daughter of Evil

Original translation here.

Okay, I suppose I should just up and say it: I am really dissatisfied with this particular translation of mine.

悪の娘 (read as Aku no Musume) is probably one of Rin Kagamine's most well known songs, and it's definitely up there as far as my favorite Vocaloids music is concerned. Or just favorite music, period. The lyrics tell a story of Rin Kagamine in her alter ego as a princess of an evil kingdom, from her unjust rule to Kaito falling in love with Miku and the war that resulted from her jealousy.

And that's really the problem with my translation: I translated it as a story, really. I'm reasonably confident that the translation is free of major errors... although, no promises on verses 7 and 8 (discounting spoken lines and the chorus, which repeats twice before the 7th verse arrives); I'm not certain that those are perfectly translated. Still, even the translation I have does communicate some idea of what the lyrics are saying.

But for this, I feel it's insufficient. I read my translation back to myself, and realized that any sense of the actual song has simply vanished. I was originally motivated to do this when I saw a translation that I felt focused too much on the lyrical aspect (enforced an ABAB rhyme scheme, added in and/or took out major details to help maintain it), but surely taking that aspect out entirely shouldn't be the goal here.

Unfortunately, I don't know how best to fix the problem. Some kind of meter restriction may be in order, perhaps? While I can certainly read music and even reproduce it to a limited extent, I have no experience at all with songwriting, and I feel like that's the skill set that I could use right about now. So as much as I want to do a rewrite of this translation, until I figure out a decent way to account for the "song" part of it, not much is going to happen.

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