The Sunday Share: Badly translated songs: The Sounds Of Silence
February 18th, 2024 at 06:56pm
Back in the early days of this blog, I started a feature called Samuel’s Musician(s) Of The Week where I would feature a musician and one of their songs each week. Over time I went through a lot of the music I like and featured many wonderful songs, and I have decided to continue this but with a bit of a change to the format.
The category is now called “The Sunday Share” and will expand a little bit beyond music. At first I think a lot of what I will post here will continue to be music that I wish to share with you, but I will also share other videos with you which have interested me and possibly even articles or documents.
This week I am sharing with you a video by musician Malinda Kathleen Reese who has, in addition to her own music, produced many videos of various well-known songs with their lyrics translated many times by Google Translate. Automated translation tools are a bit hit and miss at the best of times, and once you take a translation and re-translate it and keep going with that process, you end up with some rather unusual and amusing results.
This one is not my favourite of her work, but it’s the first one I came across and it is very good. The amount of effort put into the production alone is impressive. Also, the song in question, The Sounds Of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel is one I am quite fond of. It was even the first item on Radio 2CC’s emergency tape at one stage which kicks in after 30 seconds of silence…clearly whoever set that up had a sense of humour.
I will share a few more of Malinda’s very good and amusing translation videos in future.
Samuel
Entry Filed under: The Sunday Share
4 Comments Add your own
1. nbrettoner | February 19th, 2024 at 10:02 am
Hi Samuel,
Thanks for sharing this vibrant “family~of~twins” here.
Vibrantly clever.
Being only partially functional/fictional when I began reading this, I miss under stood that (so I thought) that it was you doing a Samualization number on this ladie’s work.
She’s good at doing brilliant.
I don’t think I meantioned I was in Canberra early last year for Hania Rani’s concert performance?.
The queue at the merch table afterwards was long so I sat down and waited until the last one was there. Then I got to chat with Hania in person for several minutes. Very Special.
This was the first I ever saw of her, and for well over an hour I was unable to break away from the PC screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5oZ80Daduc&t=492s&ab_channel=Cercle
Truly amazing person. Very Special.
Take care, glad you’re back! 🙂
Noel Brettoner
Coffs Harbour, ex-Deni-ite 🙂
2. Samuel | February 19th, 2024 at 4:53 pm
Hi Noel,
It’s funny you mention that you thought it might be me singing in this video. Do you remember the very first episode of Samuel’s Persiflage with its operatic introduction performed by yours truly? The intro which lasted only one episode because most of the listeners seemed to think screeching cats dragging their nails across a blackboard is a more appealing sound.
Well, I have intermittently given some thought to performing my own operatic covers of various well-known songs. It’s something I may give some more thought to inflicting upon…err, I mean bestowing upon this blog.
You had not mentioned you were in Canberra for Hania’s concert, or at least I don’t think you did. I will check the video shortly.
In the meantime, thanks for your phone number. It seems I already have it. I’ve removed it from your comment as posting it on here or any other openly available website is a sure-fire way to wind up on even more bizarre scam telemarketing call lists. I have an operatic voicemail greeting to deal with such calls, much to the bemusement of legitimate callers.
3. nbrettoner | February 25th, 2024 at 3:44 pm
Hi Samuel, does/did your operatic voicemail involve boards nails and cats?.
I could easily utter a pearcingly loud (like lowd; only differenT), high pitch tremulous, er, NOT operatic noise, when said nails were applied to an unsuitable depth.
Apologies re “the ####’s”. I tend to easily forget that my replies are not personal for you alone.
Been raining all day and started a couple of days ago.
I enjoyed David’s composition style (I was nearly naughty and type stile) and playing.
Glad you have him, and that other people enjoy his playing too.
4. Samuel | February 26th, 2024 at 1:34 am
My operatic style is derived from Hyacinth Bucket in ‘Keeping Up Appearances’.
When that was airing on the ABC of a weekday evening when I was a kid, I didn’t understand that she was singing badly and set about emulating her. The style grew from there. I’m sure many people would prefer to hear the chalkboard and nails and cats!
I’m glad you enjoyed David’s music. I will see him today and pass on the message.
No worries about the phone number. Easily fixed.
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