Talk:Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär

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Songs

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Disputed translation

This article was recently created by User:Tamtam90, and I thank them for that. However, the (unsourced) translation is an utter misrepresentation of the German text. The mistranslation of Wenn to 'When' is what caught my eye first. On closer reading, their English text has often no equivalent in the German: 'ford'? 'rise'? 'on earth'? 'heave'? 'dreams'? ' We stand one by one with thee'? In fact, verses 2 and 3 make no sense at all.

While correcting the translation, I also made more that half a dozen other improvements – some quite substantial – as described in my edit summaries. Tamtam90 reverted them all, twice. I would welcome the input of other editors in this matter; I've posted a note at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Poetry, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Songs and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Children's literature. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 00:25, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Poetic translation doesn't need to be completely identical to the original. I don't know why the awesome text (which you put instead of my original translation) must impress the readers as a song. Nevertheless, I already published (under a free license) 50 my translations into another tongue, and some (though still here, within the articles) in en-wiki. The source of the current translation is here. --Tamtam90 (talk) 14:28, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That "source" fails WP:RS. Your poetic translation misrepresents the meaning of the German text: "If I were", not "When"; 'wenn' / 'when' are false friends. How do you respond to my other objections in your wording? I'm going to restore my literal translation and mark yours as poetic. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:53, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

About "if" your link says another thing (2nd case: "if on the condition that"). If all poets translated foreign songs literally, there hardly would be any song "expansion" at all. OK, you might do that in three columns. --Tamtam90 (talk) 11:48, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I have removed the "poetic" translation from the article, for several reasons:

This is a very short article about a short German song. Including more than one translation might be helpful in a longer and more detailed article, especially if the different translations illustrate different interpretations of the song, and those differing interpretations are discussed in the body of the article. But that is not the case here. Two separate English translations in an article with only three sentences of encyclopedic text seems excessive, so I have decided to remove one of them.

A translation in an encyclopedia article should, first and foremost, accurately reflect the meaning of the original text. This does not mean that it cannot also be a work or art, or have historic or poetic values of its own, but its primary purpose in an encyclopedia article (as opposed to, say, an anthology of poetry) is to communicate the meaning of the poem as clearly as possible to readers who cannot read the original language. The "poetic" translation, with its misunderstandings of German and English syntax and vocabulary, and its peculiar, unidiomatic use of English words that correspond to to nothing in the German text, fails to do this. Some of the problems have already been listed above. I will add one further example: at the beginning of the third stanza, the German "Es vergeht keine Stund in der Nacht, / da mein Herze nicht erwacht, / und an dich gedenkt" is accurately rendered in the other translation as "Not an hour of the night goes by / that my heart doesn't wake / and think of you". The "poetic" translation reads "Any hour shortens the night, / Once again my heart to bite, / Thee again to call." What exactly this is supposed to mean in English is not clear to me, but it has little or nothing to do with the German, where there is no shortening of the night and no biting of the heart. If the author wants to defend this as an original poetic reimagining of the German song, I'm not going to argue about it, but Wikipedia is not a place to publish original poetic reimaginings. This has guided my choice when deciding which of the two translations to remove.

It is also a problem that the "poetic" translation was added to the article by its author, and that he has been fighting to keep it there in spite of the problems pointed out by other editors. While the situation may be different in other wiki projects, citing and quoting self-published original work is frowned on here: see WP:SELFPUB and WP:USESPS. The fact that the author's work was originally published on Wikisource doesn't change this. Wikisource can be a WP:Reliable source when it reproduces previously published works that are themselves reliable sources, such as 19th- and early 20th-century literature and scholarship that have since fallen into the public domain. But Wikisource also permits the uploading of original, self-published works, and that material is no different from the user-generated content posted on Facebook, or IMDB, or someone's personal blog. It's not clear to me whether this particular poem is best treated as an original work of creative art or as a form of original research (expressing the author's opinion about the meaning of the German song), but either way the author should not be adding his own poetry to the article, because this can easily give the appearance of promotional editing. WP:SELFCITE advises editors who wish to cite their own published work to "defer to the community's opinion" and let others decide whether the material in question is appropriate or not. At least four different editors have expressed reservations about the quality and accuracy of the "poetic" translation of Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär, either here on the talk page or in the discussion started by the translation's author at ANI, and no one but the author has explicitly defended it. Although this is not a large sample, it is also not a strong endorsement of the value of the translation, and it does not suggest that the article is made better by its inclusion, especially now that an alternative translation is available. I have therefore removed it. If the author would like to restore it, I suggest that he try to build consensus for the restoration here on the talk page before doing so.

Courtesy pings to @Michael Bednarek: and @Tamtam90:. – Crawdad Blues (talk) 16:29, 30 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]