Grafton Globe Newspaper
Winter 2020 Edition
As children, we all encountered children’s nursery songs in some form or another. Maybe it was in the background of a television program, or maybe your parents sang them to you before bedtime. These songs are iconic to us—we often know melodies of these songs at the mention of the titles. However, while the tunes may be universally recognized, the same cannot be said for the lyrics. Naturally, lyrics for these classic songs differ in countries where English is not the main language. Let’s look at one example: “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in English versus in Japanese. *hand translated from my own Japanese knowledge; may not be 100% accurate
It is noticeable how different the English version is compared to the Japanese version. Both song lyrics are taken from different point of views—the English version is taken from a first person perspective, while the Japanese version seems to be taken from a third person omniscient perspective, focusing on the views of a star in the sky looking down at the Earth. Besides the perspectives, the lyrics themselves also hold different focuses. The English version questions the stars and the lyrics “wonder what [they] are”. However, in the Japanese version, the lyrics are more of a response to this question as it explains what the stars’ condition; the lyrics explain that the stars are “blinking, watching over everyone”. On the contrary, in lines 4-5 of the English version, the sparkling nature of the stars is highlighted through a simile comparing stars to diamonds. This simile, or something of a similar nature, is not present in the Japanese version. The sole mentions of the sparkling nature of the stars are in the lines 1 and 5. Despite being different from one another in meaning, both versions of the song hold a similar basis: a twinkling star. The differences come once the perspective and lyrics of the songs are taken into account. But these songs do have some similarities. For instances, both have the same rhythm to match the tune we all know. This means that, in addition to matching the rhythm, the lyrics are both formatted similarly, with the first two lines being repeated in the last two lines. Both songs start with the the idea of twinking, but then diverge. Although there are comparisons and contrasts that can be found in the two versions, something else of note is the lyrical style in the Japanese song. The Japanese lines are written mostly in hiragana, the basic form of Japanese characters, with a limited amount of kanji, characters taken from Chinese. This is because for children, it is easier to understand the 46 hiragana characters than the almost endless number of kanji characters. Both songs’ lyrics are written at a primitive level—something that children can easily understand, but this is especially evident in the Japanese version where the lyrics use specific characters for the children.
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February 2020
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