When devising a singable song-translation, one has a very specific purpose: to produce a text which a singer can sing to an audience. Those who most stress the importance of thinking about the endpurpose — functionalists such as Hans Vermeer — use the term skopos. The making of singable translations is a very complex skopos, because the target text must fit the pre-existing music — its rhythms, note-values, phrasings and stresses — while still retaining the essence of the source text. This article discusses practical strategies for meeting these difficult requirements, and recommends what the author calls the “Pentathlon Principle,” a deliberate balancing of five different criteria — singability, sense, naturalness, rhythm and rhyme. This balancing should be central to the overall strategy and also a guide to microlevel decision-making. Translators are warned against any a priori view that identifies a single feature of the source text as absolutely sacrosanct: the more margins of flexibility available, the greater chance of a successful result. Practical examples are taken from French popular chanson, German Lied, and Maori song, all translated into English.
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