Our friends at Ha’aretz – without whom this blog would get updated even less than it does – bring us an interview with Daniel Efrat, who is responsible for Hebrew translations of several Broadway musicals, including “Next to Normal” and “Blood Brothers.”
Efrat discusses the unique challenges of translating a musical into Hebrew (not enough one-syllable words, for one thing), and lists the major mistakes that translators of musical theater tend to make – putting the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllable, as well as the “Zimmerman” – trying to push too many syllables into a phrase.
The article also mentions a couple of past musical translating quandaries, primarily that notorious My Fair Lady line about “the rain in Spain,” which in Hebrew, as you might or might not remember, was transformed into hail, and was confined to the south of Spain only.