Postby Mercurio » November 28th, 2017 9:39 pm
As a native English speaker learning Spanish, I find it is very hard to translate a Spanish song into English, but it is much easier to translate an English song into Spanish and produce a result that makes sense and is not embarrassing. However, you will find that translating a song from English to Spanish is far harder than translating your thoughts from thoughts into Spanish. When you want to express your own thoughts, you have a lot more freedom to pick vocabulary and make things simple. When translating a song, you are faced with the realization that most songs say very little, if you boil it down to simple vocabulary.
Here is how I would translate the song Chantaje by Shakira, using only very basic vocabulary:
Maluma: You are my girlfriend, but we are having relationship problems. Why don't you talk about this to my face?
Shakira: No, no, I totally like you. But I am unpredictable and difficult.
Both: You are pure, pure blackmail.
Everything else is just metaphors and stuff that rhymes and subtext. It's not like the song tells a story, at least not beyond what I have written above. It's not even clear what it means to call your partner "pure blackmail".
