The first recorded examples of song translation are found in the early 1900s. These years are the period when recording devices and records first entered human life. In other words, music and translation have always existed side by side since the first records, that is, the first recordings. Today, there are many song translations among the endless number of musical works that we can easily access from digital platforms. The anonymous folk melody "Izmir's Poplars", the first recording of which we came across in 1908, the opera "Madame Butterfly", which was translated into Turkish and staged in 1940 under the leadership of Carl Ebert, "Bak Bir Varmış Bir Yokmuş", which was released on record in 1961 with the Turkish lyrics written by Fecri Ebcioğlu to the French pop song "C'est Ecrit Dans Le Ciel" and the interpretation of İlham Gencer, "Burn Everything Everything", which was released on cassette in 1991 with the lyrics and interpretation written by Sezen Aksu to the Greek original "Mia Pista Apo Vosforo", Translated from the French original "Comme D'habitude" into English as "My Way" and released in 2011 with Turkish lyrics by Athena, "Ben Gibiyim" are just a few of the many examples of song translation for performance. Song translation is frequently encountered in TV series, movies and advertisements broadcast on traditional television channels and digital platforms, as well as in the dubbing and/or subtitles of songs in computer games broadcast simultaneously with the world.
Research in academic circles, which started with opera translation since the 1970s, increased in the early 2000s with the interest shown in genres such as folk melodies, pop music, and rock music translation, and started to develop the field and quality of song translation research. Although the research on song translation has been increasing relatively in the world since these years, it is observed that there are no researchers working in this field, except for a few people, especially in Turkish publications. The fact that the content of the "Song Translation" course, which started to be offered in 2017 within the Department of Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University and is a first in the history of the Republic of Turkey, remains as a small detail in the "Audiovisual Translation" course, which is mostly found in the programs of the translation and interpreting and translation studies departments of universities, may have played a role in this deficiency by not adequately informing the students who will be the researchers of the future about song translation. Song translation, with all its sub-fields, is becoming more and more important both as a field of research and in terms of the need in the industry. 1, which we believe will play an important role in filling this gap. Papers to be sent to the National Song Translation Congress may be on the following topics or other topics related to song translation:
- Song translation for performance
- Subtitle translation of songs in TV series and movies
- Song translation in cartoons
- Song translation in the field of humor
- Translation of songs between indicators (e.g. from poetry to music)
- Music and song translation in literature
- Song translation in the context of retranslation
- Song translation between languages
- In-language song translation
- Interlingual/intralingual translation of folk melodies
- Opera/libretto translations (performance-oriented/subtitled/supertitled)
- Artificial intelligence and song translation
- History of song translation
- Anthologies and song translation
- Translations of songs for informational purposes on fanbooks and websites