Translation Woes

The past few days I've been obsessing in converting to English a particular Korean song that's probably one of the hardest songs to convert for more than just one reason. The title of the song is Wanna Be Free, sung by a Korean actress whose name I've given up trying to remember. It's a piece created for a game called Ragnarok Online, and is basically a background tune laced with Korean lyrics. Sounds simple enough right? It gets complicated faster than having a black man in the White House.

First of all, there are no existing translations of the song online, and Korean isn't exactly the language of the masses. Every attempt I've had in asking for translations have either been ignored or met with stupid questions to the likes of "What's this gibberish?" and "North Korean or South Korean?". It hurt my head so much, I'm still in therapy as of this moment.

But then again, there'a break. The song is based on a traditional Korean song called Jeongeupsa - a classical song and I actually found lyrics for that one. Here comes a big problem - everything in the lyrics so figurative that I can't directly translate squat into English without losing the sense of what the song means.

Okay, okay, so maybe I'm just being too whiney about that part. I can actually do the conversion such that the English lyrics will fit. But then there's another problem - even if the song fits. In case you havent heard the tune of Wanna Be Free!, it's actually one of the cheeriest songs in the world. A suicidal man about to jump off could hear it and start orgasming enough to not want to kill himself anymore.

The last claim may or may not have been exaggerated.

In case you're interested, the meaning of the lyrics of Wanna Be Free is about a woman begging the moon to grow brighter so her peddler husband can find his way home. The woman is dying from some sort of skin disease (probably leprosy) so she has only one eye left to look for her husband - and her husband happens to be dead already. I don't think I can put in more tragedy into something more tragic than that.

See the problem there?

Even if I can translate the song word per word, people will be asking why the lyrics are so goddamn morbid even if the tune is ecstasy-grade happy. And what's more likely, a translator fucking up his work and turning somebody else's good song bad or a retarded composer turning his/her own bad? That's right. It will look bad on my part.

After a few hours of trying, I finally get pissed off and just laid out the lyrics somewhere between "somewhat related" and "completely fabricated". So, instead of the wife singing, the husband does the singing - and he's no longer dead. And there will be no more mention of dead eyeballs and leprosy. I censored the song like a communist on a cultural revolution.

And while we're on the subject, WHY ARE KOREANS SO DAMN INCLINED TO EVERYTHING TRAGIC? Somebody always dies in their soaps/movies. Bad endings are mandatory. In music videos, the death rate is one per video. If countries were people, Korea would be that emo kid who always mopes and makes poems about death. I hate emo kids, no wonder the gothtard North Korea is always up the South's ass.

Anyway back to translation. I'm actually done already, and am just waiting for the scheduling of the recording session. In case you're curious how hard translation can get, I'd like you to try converting this sentence to English:

Pang-ilang presidente si Manuel Roxas?

"Manuel Roxas" doesn't have to be translated anymore so basically that's just three words to translate. Now go kiss your elbow.