What’s the first thing you do when you are cast in a role for the first time or are about to learn a new part? Order the score and take a highlighter to it. After that? Well, maybe you buy some recordings, Netflix a DVD, or start looking around YouTube for scenes. But, otherwise, it’s translation time!
For most of us who have enough formal training to be in the know, that means hitting the library (personal or academic—or maybe public, if your town has a really tricked-out library) and seeing if there’s a Castel book. Leyerle Publications’ series of opera and song libretti, the most prominent of which are translated by Nico Castel, are the de facto gold standard of opera translations. They contain pronunciation for every line spelled out in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), word-for-word literal translations and, for difficult passages, often a more idiomatic translation or professorial explanation of unusual concepts.
The Leyerle books will probably solve 90 percent of our translation needs. But what if you’re doing an aria or song that’s obscure enough not to have an off-the-shelf translation? What if you don’t have access to the books or time to wait for them to be shipped? (There are unfortunately still no digital download or eBook versions.) What other options do you have? The linguistically inclined among us can largely make do armed with our knowledge and a good dictionary. But few among us have a strong enough foundation in every language to make this work. You have to have a high comfort level with the grammatical intricacies of a language to navigate what are often archaic texts.
The tech savvy will probably turn to Google Translate. Actually, you don’t need to be that tech savvy. Most of us use Google for everything from getting driving directions to settling bets on what year Sills debuted her Cleopatra (1966). So how well does Google actually translate libretti? What about other common online translation tools? And how do those stack up to Castel’s work?
In this edition of “The Tech-Savvy Singer,” we’re going to compare a few lines of lyrics from one of the most frequently performed operas, La traviata, as translated in Nico Castel’s The Complete Verdi Libretti, Volume Four against translations by Google Translate (translate.google.com), Bing Translator (bing.com/translator), and the Dictionary.com Translator (translate.reference.com).
Let’s start with something that seems pretty straightforward. Or so I thought.
“Oh, la bugia pietosa ai medici è concessa.”
It’s from the last act. Doctor: You’re getting better! Violetta: Ha-ha-ha-ha! That’s funny.
Castel: Oh, the lie merciful to doctors is permitted!/Oh, doctors are allowed merciful lies! 1
The Complete Verdi Libretti here gives both the word-for-word translation and the simplified, easy-to-understand English, showing that Maestro Castel didn’t think this translation was as obvious as I did. I guess the word order is a bit unintuitive to Anglophones.
Google Translate: Oh, the pitiful lie to doctors is granted.
Google Translate has some great features, as we’ve come to expect from Google products in general. The translation appears dynamically as you type, so you can see how the nuance of each word varies depending on the words you add around it. The special characters keyboard, in the lower left corner of the source language text box, is customized to your selected language. And if the translation you get isn’t up to par, you can anonymously suggest how it can be improved.
But here’s something that happened as I was entering the phrase that cannot be overlooked: Google Translate is so sensitive to nuance that changing the o in “oh” from lowercase to capital, changed the translation. When I first entered it, I typed a lowercase o and was presented with the translation “oh, the pious lie to doctors is granted.” I don’t know why Google’s algorithm thinks that changing “oh” to “Oh” should change “pious” to “pitiful,” but those words have significantly different meanings.
Then I started wondering what other subtleties would have drastic changes, so I took out the comma. With the capital O, I get “Oh pitiful lie to doctors is granted.” With lowercase, I get “oh lie compassionate physicians is granted.” Finally, they got the translation of pietosa right: “compassionate” makes the most sense and is closest to Castel’s “merciful.” In the process, though, they did away with the articles and prepositions.
Using Google Translate can be quite informative with a little experimentation, but you need to be aware that subtle changes in your entered text can have drastic effects on the translation. Meanwhile, I went back to the original output, “Oh, the pitiful lie to doctors is granted,” clicked the “Improve this Translation” icon, and changed “pitiful” to “compassionate.” Maybe now that little oddity will be fixed by the time this article is published. Try it out and see!
Bing Translator: Oh, pitiful lie to doctors is granted.
Bing, as a wanna-be Google competitor, has some similar features to Google Translate. It displays translations dynamically and allows you to rate, via thumbs-up/thumbs-down, the translation it gives you. However, I could not get a special characters inserter to come up even after looking through their help page, so you better have those shortcut keys memorized.
I don’t know why Bing strips out the article: the text I entered clearly states “la bugia pietosa ai medici è concessa,” and I don’t know what would make Microsoft ignore the “la.” But the good news is that I ran the same experiments with capitalization and commas and Bing fared better. Changing “Oh” to “oh” had no effect on the translation, but removing the comma, similarly to Google, gave me “Oh compassionate doctors lie is granted.” Why removing the comma turns “pitiful” into “compassionate” is still beyond me.
Dictionary.com Translator: Oh, the lie pitiful doctors and granted.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! What is the point of having a special characters keyboard if you are going to ignore the accent over the e, reading it as e, which means “and,” instead of as è, which means “is”? No. We are not using this translator. Dictionary.com, you are fired.
Now let’s try something harder.
“Ma il turpe sonno a frangere il ver mi balenò!”
Poor Alfredo and his disgrace. (This is the disgrace he is feeling in the beginning of the second act, not the disgrace he feels in the rest of the opera.)
Castel: But my shameful slumber to break off the truth appeared to me!/But the truth came to me to break off my shameful slumber!
I’m glad Castel explains this one idiomatically, because slumber breaking off truth and truth breaking off slumber would be two entirely different plots.
Google Translate: But the ugly sleep has broken the truth flashed upon me!
I don’t know about “ugly.” Collins’ online dictionary (www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/italian-english/) gives me words like “filthy,” “vile,” and “repugnant” for turpe. And we still have that problem where sleep is breaking the truth instead of vice-versa.
To continue our experiments from the first round, I lowercased ma and, true to form, Google Translate gave me a new translation: “but the vile sleep has broken the truth flashed upon me!” So for some reason, Google Translate seems to give more accurate translations without capital letters. (Removing the exclamation point didn’t change anything.) Still, this English just doesn’t make much sense and is certainly not what librettist Piave intended.
Bing Translator: But the turpe sleep to break the truth I flashed!
Maybe “ugly” wasn’t such a bad translation for turpe after all. It beats “turpe.” But beyond that, there’s some grammatical incorrectness here. The phrase mi balenò doesn’t mean “I flashed,” it means “flashed me”—or, as Google nicely put it, “flashed upon me.” As for continued adventures in capitalization, changing Ma to ma does not give us a better translation for turpe.
Dictionary.com Translator: But the obscene sleep to break the ver i glimpse!
I know. I shouldn’t have tried Dictionary.com again. I got what I deserved. But there are some interesting things going on here. “Obscene” is maybe too strong a word, but it’s closer to the intended meaning than “ugly” (and way closer than “turpe”). And it was smart enough to realize that “flash” here is idiomatic for something revealed in a flash, or “glimpsed.”
But it is still grammatically confused about who/what is glimpsing and who/what is being glimpsed. It also didn’t do anything with the word “ver.” And I’m rather confused about the lowercase i. How do you take what is a legitimate word in Italian (mi) and translate it into what is not a word in English (“i”)? Microsoft Word is hardly even letting me type that without capitalizing it.
Finally, let’s give Giorgio Germont a chance to speak.
“Si, dell’incauto, che a ruina corre, ammaliato da voi.”
Oh snap, Papa Germont! That’s no way to speak to Violetta in your third line of the opera!
Castel: Yes, of the unwary boy who to ruin rushes, bewitched by you./Yes, of that unwary boy who is rushing to his ruin bewitched by you.
This one doesn’t make much sense out of context. You wouldn’t know why he was starting with “of the unwary boy” unless you got that he was continuing the thought of “I am the father” (“I am the father of that unwary boy . . .).” In other words, this isn’t really a complete sentence. This should be interesting for the machine translators to figure out.
Google Translate: Yes, dell’incauto, which runs to ruin, bewitched by you.
Wait, how do you get all that complicated stuff about running to ruin and being bewitched by you, but you can’t understand “of the incautious”? I thought that was the easy part.
Just for fun, I removed all the commas and got “It dell’incauto to ruin that runs charmed by you.” Fair enough; it was hard enough to figure this sentence out even with the commas.
Bing Translator: Yes, the incautious, that to ruin runs, dazzled by you.
Not bad, Bing! It got everything except “of.” Point, Microsoft.
Dictionary.com Translator: Yes, of the incautious to ruin runs, charmed by you.
Wow, I’m actually impressed. Dictionary.com is the only one able to correctly translate “dell’incauta,” and got the rest of it right as well. It could have inserted a “that” or “who” between “incautious” and “to,” but otherwise this looks pretty good. Way to make a comeback, Dictionary.com!
I think our takeaway here is that, barring access to a quality, singer-centric translation like Castel’s, online translation can be somewhat effective if you take a lot of precautions. Check, double-check, and cross-check everything. Try different translators and see how they compare. Look up individual words in dictionaries. Lowercase capped words. Note points of confusion that you can bring to a coach or a native speaker. Translating centuries-old poetic texts isn’t something that’s going to be fully automated any time soon.
Endnotes
1 All Castel translations taken from Nico Castel’s The Complete Verdi Libretti: In Four Volumes. Vol. 4. 1994. Geneseo, NY: Leyerle.
