Health & Fitness
From the River Forest Library - Music Detective - Translating the Universal Language
River Forest Library offers up step by step info on translating the lyrics of your favorite songs written in a foreign language.
They say music is the “universal language”. But what if you don’t speak the language of your favorite singer or band? In that case, you might benefit from learning some easy ways to translate lyrics for your favorite foreign language songs.
To start, find the lyrics of the song you’d like to translate. If you don’t have them written down or on sheet music, try looking them up at one of these sites: lyrics.com, lyricfind.com, letssingit.com, or lyricsmode.com. Type in the song you are looking for, and when the lyrics pop up, copy the text as it displays in your browser.
On to the translation! Two of the major search engines also have built in language translators. To try Google’s language translator, visit translate.google.com. For Yahoo’s version, check out babelfish.yahoo.com. At the translator site, paste the lyrics that you copied into the first text box. Choose the languages you’d like to translate to and from, and view the results in the second text box.
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Language translators can help make your love of world music that much more universal. Happy listening!
Visit RFPL Beats for more musings on music from the River Forest Public Library.
