Where to translate Spanish songs into English

By | April 11, 2021

Do it yourself

If you want to take a shot at your own English translation of a Spanish language song, here are some websites that can help you do just that.

Babelfish is the longest-running translation site on the Internet. You simply write your lyrics in the dialog, select Spanish-English translation and submit. If the lyrics are on the web, you can also enter the URL of Babelfish, and the service translates the entire page. Once you have received a translation, Babelfish even offers an alternative for you to search the web using the translated text. This is a good way to check the accuracy of your translation: Sometimes Babelfish may lack nuances of meaning or skip words that it does not recognize, so you get a patchy or incorrect translation. Search with translated text allows you to find other translations of your texts and compare them.

Google Translate is another automatic translation service. It also gives you an option to search the web with your translated text. And if you are not quite sure if the song you are translating is really Spanish, Google Translate has a ‘discovery language’ feature that will verify it for you.

Get It done for you

It can be difficult to make your own English translations of Spanish songs if you do not have a good message in the language. Many popular songs will use slang or idioms that you may not be familiar with and conventional online translation services may not be able to translate. Fortunately, there are many places on the web where you can request that a native Spanish speaker do the translation for you, or where you can find a translation has already been done.

AllTheLyrics.com has a Spanish translation forum where users request English translations of Spanish songs. Users translate everything from reggaeton star Pitbull to Latin pop veteran Miguel Bose. There are often lively discussions about different forum users’ interpretations of specific slang terms, or exactly what word an artist sings. It is also a ‘sticky’ (permanently promoted to the front page) after listing all the Spanish songs that have already been translated on the forum, and provides links to the threads where they have been translated.

LyricsTranslate.com also has a Spanish / English translation forum, but the traffic there seems to be light, with few responses to posts requesting translations.

Learning By Singing Spanish is a blog run by a woman who does her own Spanish to English translations of popular songs. She groups them by artist and also by country, so you can see the differences in the Spanish dialect from place to place. She accepts requests for song translations. There are two ways to translate Spanish songs into English via the web: do it yourself, or have someone else do it for you. Online translation services can help you with the past, while lyrically specific messaging forums are the best places to find already translated songs or request a new translation that you have not found anywhere else on the web.

Source:danspela.com