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.
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