Music and Translation

Book excerpt: This book explores how transformations and translations shape musical meanings, developments and the perception of music across cultures. Starting with the concept of music as multimodal text, the author understands translation as the process of transferring a text from one language – verbal or not – into another, interlingually, intralingually or intersemiotically, as well as the products that are derived from this process. She situates music and translation within their contemporary global context, examining the tensions between local and global, cosmopolitan and national, and universal and specific settings, to arrive at a celebration of the translational power of music and an in-depth study of how musical texts are translated. This book will be of interest to translation studies scholars who want to broaden their horizons, as well as to musicians and music scholars seeking to understand how cultural exchange and dissemination can be driven by translation.