User blog:JoshuaJSlone/An attempt at song localization

When I'm listening to a song enough and am either checking out a lyrics page or watching a video with an English translation bolted on, it's not unusual to imagine how the song would sound with those words or something close to them in place. Usually not so well--for a literal translation what's short in one language might be long in another, what's fun rhyming or wordplay in Japanese is totally lost, or sometimes it's already built around a mix of Japanese and English so trying to go all of either way wouldn't work well. How could one really deal with major lines like "Wakuteka Take a chance" or "suki sukissu kisu"? However, for a change when I attempted to do this, it mostly worked out.

Te wo Nigitte Arukitai. Originally a Goto Maki song, but it was the S/mileage cover I first heard and got hooked on. I started with the translation at Project Hello (credit to peachygirldb). Did a draft where I modified each line to have a proper number of syllables. Then continued cleaning it up trying to make things rhyme where they should or simply match the flow of the original better. There are still parts I think could use sanding, but on the whole I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I did most of the work a couple months ago, so by now rather than coming up with better ideas I've just gotten used to the lumpy bits.

Here are the results. If you scroll down you can see both notes about places I made changes or considered various alternatives. Further down is an earlier draft from the "match the syllables" phase, which I kept around so I could get a bigger picture of how things improved.