How music and lyrics interact : A translation-oriented analysis of musical narrative in Disney’s “Let it go”

Abstract

Much research on song translation focuses on formal constraints, such as rhyme and rhythm, but few studies seem to investigate the relationship between lyrics and music itself. This study examines how meaning is constructed in music, and how the meaning of music interacts with the meaning of lyrics in a song translation context. The analysis follows three paradigms of meaning in music: musical narrative, music rhetoric, and music semantics. These paradigms are used to describe the meaning of the music of the Disney song “Let it go”, from the 2013 musical film Frozen. Disney songs are some of the most commonly translated songs, and as such, they have an important effect on child development. It is found that on a general level, the music of “Let it go” expresses a victory of a rebellious force over an established order, which is expressed by means of a growth of energy and intensity. This growth closely follows the four rhetorical phases of the narratio, probatio, dubitatio, and peroratio, which allows for a structural analysis of musical meaning and narrative. The findings suggest that treating the music of a song as a central element can guide the translation process and scholarly analysis of songs and their translations. This study stresses the importance of the role of music in the multimodal product that is a song.