The translation of Dear Evan Hansen: a needle in a haystack.

Abstract

The popular adage states that “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Just as with words, there are more ways than one of expressing art too. If we take songs as an example, “music relies on our hearing, our somatic feeling, as well as the visual presentation” (Minors, 2021: 15). Until a few years ago, research on the translation of songs was linked to operatic texts and classic musical works with stories narrated almost entirely through song. The connections studied between text, image and music were therefore restricted to an exclusive audience with very distinct characteristics (purchasing power, proficiency in other languages, high intellect, etc.). The “study of song translation needs empirical evidence, basic facts about how target texts have historically looked” (Franzon, 2021: 84). Recent studies of teenage musical audiovisual productions confirm that the general tendency ─if translating songs─ is not to dub, but to subtitle them, carrying out strategies of mixed interlinguistic translation (Cruz-Durán, 2022). However, in 2021 Universal Studios launched Dear Evan Hansen, a film adaptation of the Tony and Grammy Awardwinning teenage musical of the same name, and in which both dialogues and songs were dubbed into Spanish. For that reason, the present work analyses its translation since it is believed to be a unique opportunity to delves into song translation in the 21st century. This study will be conducted from a functionalist perspective, based on the most recent studies on the translation of musical films addressed to a teenage audience, in order to collect concrete data that keeps strengthening the foundation of this field of work from both a theorical and practical approach.