Hollywood's First Chinese American Star + Pronouns Lost in Translation - KQED - Translation

She Fought Racism in Early Hollywood. Now She'll Be the First Asian American on US Currency

The pioneering Asian American actress Anna May Wong is one of five American women the U.S. Mint is recognizing this year with an image on the American quarter, and the first Asian American to appear on U.S. currency. Wong was born in Los Angeles in 1905, and she grew up helping out at her father's laundromat. When the film industry moved from New York to Hollywood, she started skipping school to visit movie sets. She would eventually go on to become Hollywood’s first Chinese American movie star. Wong fought the ever-present obstacle of institutional racism in the film industry to forge a remarkable career that spanned 40 years. Host Sasha Khokha talks about Wong’s legacy with Nancy Wang Yeun, a sociologist and expert on race in Hollywood.

Lost in Translation

What is it like to talk about your gender identity in different languages? What happens when the pronouns for “he” and “she” in a particular language are similar, or even identical? We meet Emmett Chen-Ran, who decided during his senior year of high school to tell his parents he is transgender. While he grappled with whether they would accept and understand him, there was another challenge: deciding what language he should use to tell them – English or Chinese? The California Report Magazine’s former intern Izzy Bloom and reporter Elena Neale-Sacks bring us this story, which first aired on NPR’s Code Switch.

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Yeet! Merriam-Webster adds 'baller,' 'cringe' and 'pumpkin spice' to the dictionary - CNN - Dictionary

(CNN)If you like to turn a lewk, regularly pwn your friends in "Fortnite" or find the ordinary dictionary janky, you're in luck: Merriam-Webster has added a slew of slang to its dictionary, lending new legitimacy to those informal terms and more.

It typically takes years for such slang to find its way into reference books, but Merriam-Webster says it's just following the internet's lead: We're adopting this language online quickly, so the dictionary is learning to quickly make room for these oft-used, made-up words. Read on for definitions and uses so you can level up your conversational skills.

New slang, old dictionary

Some of the words Merriam-Webster is adding have, admittedly, been in common use for over a decade: Zooey Deschanel arguably popularized the word "adorkable" when she began starring on the sitcom "New Girl," and "janky" has, at least in this author's experience, been a favorite descriptor among middle and high school students for years now.

And then there's "MacGyver," now a verb for fixing something with whatever you have on hand like the titular hero of the 1985 TV series. Better late than never, right, Merriam-Webster?

Here are a few of the new slang terms you'll find in Merriam-Webster (with definitions courtesy of the dictionary) plus examples, so you'll never have to worry whether you're being cringe for misusing these words.

Yeet (n.): An expression of surprise, approval or excited enthusiasm.

Ex.: I get to eat the cookies you baked before we eat dinner? YEET!

Yeet (v.) To throw something with force and without regard for the thing being thrown.

Ex.: I yeeted the quiz that I failed right into the trash can.

Janky (adj.): of very poor quality, or not functioning properly.

Ex.: My janky computer likes to restart itself in the middle of Zoom meetings.

Sus (adj.): short for suspicious or suspect.

Ex.: Isn't it a bit sus that you never see Peter Parker and Spider-Man in the same location?

Lewk (n.): a fashionable look distinctive to the wearer and noticeable and memorable to others.

Ex.: "RuPaul's Drag Race UK" contestant Bimini Bon Boulash turned a lewk on the runway when she emerged in a Vivienne Westwood-inspired bridal corset.

Pwn (v.): to dominate and defeat. Pronounced like "own."

Ex.: I totally pwned my opponents in an epic game of tag yesterday.

Baller (adj.): excellent, exciting or extraordinary, especially in a way that is suggestive of a lavish lifestyle.

Ex.: It was very baller of you to share your lottery winnings with us.

Other odds and ends

These words aren't considered slang, but they also weren't accepted into the Merriam-Webster dictionary until now. You may not use these words in daily life -- how often are you talking about baby hedgehogs? -- but they're important enough to belong in a reference book, at least online.

Hoglet (n.): a baby hedgehog.

Ex.: I need to snuggle that hoglet while its quills are not yet pointy.

Pumpkin spice (n.): A blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves and allspice commonly used in pumpkin pie.

Ex.: Pumpkin spice lattes were once a harbinger of autumn, but now they appear on menus starting in late summer.

LARP (n.): short for live action roleplay, a game in which players reenact fantasy scenarios.

Ex.: I twisted my ankle during a LARP session in which I pantomimed riding into battle on a horse.

Level up (v.): Advancing or improving oneself as if you're playing a game.

Ex.: In her song "Level Up," Ciara implores us all to drop the haters holding us back and instead explore our full potential.

Metaverse (n.): A virtual environment in which users can access multiple virtual realities.

Ex.: In the metaverse, all I do is buy digital clothes for my avatar and talk to other users.

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Chiafele's book shortlisted for the 2022 Italian Prose in Translation Award - Office of Communications and Marketing - Translation

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Associate Professor of Italian Anna Chiafele and Dr. Lisa Pike’s collaborative translation of Penelope (Bordighera Press, 2021) has been shortlisted for the 2022 Italian Prose in Translation Award, administered by the American Literary Translators Association, or ALTA.

The Italian Prose in Translation Award, or IPTA, recognizes the importance of contemporary Italian prose and promotes the translation of Italian works into English. Penelope, a novel by Italian writer Silvana La Spina, is a retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope’s point of view. For the first time ever, La Spina has been brought to the Anglophone world.

The winners will be announced at this year's ALTA’s annual awards ceremony which will be held virtually. The award-winning translator for 2022 will receive a $5,000 cash prize. The awards ceremony will air on Oct. 6 from 4 p.m. - 5:15 p.m. PT on ALTA’s Eventbrite page. This event is free and open to the public. Registration is available here.

This year’s judges for the award are Nerina Cocchi, Douglas Grant Heise and Barbara Ofosu-Somuah. Read what the judges had to say about each of the shortlisted titles here.

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Jeremy David Hanson pleads guilty to threatening Merriam-Webster over definition of 'woman' - Washington Times - Dictionary

A California man has pleaded guilty to threatening Merriam-Webster after becoming enraged that the dictionary company included gender identity in its definitions of “woman” and “girl.”

Jeremy David Hanson sent messages in October saying the company’s headquarters “should be shot up and bombed,” and the editors involved in crafting definitions should be “hunted down and shot.”

“I am sick and tired of these cultural Marxists denying science and destroying the English Language. Merriam-Webster headquarters should be shot up and bombed. Boys aren’t girls,” he wrote in one of a series of missives last year, according to FBI agents who investigated the case.

Hanson pleaded guilty to two counts of threatening interstate communications, one for his messages to Merriam-Webster and the other for similar messages to the University of North Texas.

In that case, Hanson sent a message to the university president in March saying he would “start executing tyrannical leftist students and faculty who oppress conservatives.”

“The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” he wrote.

Federal prosecutors said Hanson was motivated by hate for members of the LGBTQ community.

“Every member of our community has a right to live and exist authentically as themselves without fear,” said Rachael S. Rollins, U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, where Hanson entered his plea last week.

The FBI said Hanson had a lengthy history of threats, and they had interviewed him as far back as 2015 over messages he’d sent at the time.

In 2020 he made threats against the American Civil Liberties Union, the Land O’ Lakes corporation and a New York rabbi, the FBI said.

Agents also linked him to threats last year against local officials in Wisconsin, a video game company, DC Comics, a professor at Loyola Marymount University, Amnesty International USA, USA Today and Hasbro.

In that instance he was upset over the toy company’s decision to drop “Mr.” from the iconic “Mr. Potato Head” brand name, the FBI said.

Agents who interviewed him after that incident said he admitted he had difficulty controlling his “rage.” He said that while he sent threats, he didn’t intend to carry them out — though he also acknowledged the threats were wrong.

“He understood there was a difference between expressing himself and threatening someone, he agreed he would have to find a different outlet for his feelings when he got angry about something he saw in the news and he expressed remorse that law enforcement had to get involved,” FBI Special Agent Casey Hunter Anderson wrote in an affidavit earlier this year supporting the charge against him over the Merriam-Webster threats.

He posted threats and other derogatory comments on Merriam-Webster’s definitions of “woman,” “girl,” “boy,” “female” and “trans woman,” the FBI said.

The dictionary company took his threats seriously enough to close offices in Massachusetts and New York for five days.

Each charge Hanson pleaded guilty to carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. He is scheduled for sentencing in January.

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They Translated ‘Hamilton’ Into German. Was It Easy? Nein. - The New York Times - Translation

HAMBURG, Germany — “Hamilton” is a mouthful, even in English. Forty-seven songs; more than 20,000 words; fast-paced lyrics, abundant wordplay, complex rhyming patterns, plus allusions not only to hip-hop and musical theater but also to arcane aspects of early American history.

So imagine the challenge, then, of adapting the story of America’s first treasury secretary for a German-speaking audience — preserving the rhythm, the sound, and the sensibility of the original musical while translating its dense libretto into a language characterized by multisyllabic compound nouns and sentences that often end with verbs, and all in a society that has minimal familiarity with the show’s subject matter.

For the last four years — a timeline prolonged, like so many others, by the coronavirus pandemic — a team of translators has been working with the “Hamilton” creators to develop a German version, the first production of the juggernaut musical in a language other than English. The German-speaking cast — most of them actors of color, reflecting the show’s defining decision to retell America’s revolutionary origins with the voices of today’s diverse society — is now in the final days of rehearsal; previews begin Sept. 24 and the opening is scheduled to take place Oct. 6.

The production is an important test for “Hamilton,” which already has six English-language productions running in North America, Britain and Australia, and is hoping to follow Germany with a Spanish version in Madrid and Mexico City. But whether a translated “Hamilton” will succeed remains to be seen.

Hamburg has emerged, somewhat improbably, as a commercial theater destination — the third biggest city for musical theater in the world, after New York and London — with a sizable market of German-speaking tourists. The market began with “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” and Disney shows are a big draw: “The Lion King” and “Frozen” are now playing side-by-side on the south bank of the Elbe River, accessible by a five-minute ferry ride.

But less familiar shows have had a harder time here — “Kinky Boots” closed after a year. Sure, there are hard-core German “Hamilton” fans (some of them upset that the show is being performed in a different language from that of the cast album they love), but there are also plenty of Germans who have never even heard of Alexander Hamilton.

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

“history has its eyes on you”

Original: “History has its eyes on you.”
German: “Die Geschichte wird dabei Zeuge sein.”
Back-translation: “History will be witness.”

---

“It’s not like ‘Frozen,’ which everybody knows,” said Simone Linhof, the artistic producer of Stage Entertainment, an Amsterdam-based production company that operates four theaters in Hamburg and has the license to present “Hamilton” in German. Stage Entertainment is putting “Hamilton” in its smallest Hamburg venue, a 1,400 seat house in the lively St. Pauli district. “‘Hamilton’ is more challenging,” Linhof said.

The German cast has already adopted its own take on the show: Whereas in New York, the musical is celebrated for its dramatization of America’s founding, almost every actor interviewed here described it as a universal human story about the rise and fall of a gifted but flawed man.

“People should stop focusing on that it is American history, and focus more on the relationship between the characters,” said Mae Ann Jorolan, the Swiss actress playing Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds. “‘Hamilton’ is all about having the drive to achieve something.”

International productions have become an important contributor to the immense profitability of a handful of shows birthed on Broadway or in the West End, and they are often staged in the vernacular to make them more accessible. “The Phantom of the Opera,” for example, has been performed in 17 languages.

For “Hamilton,” Stage Entertainment executives invited translators to apply for the job by sending in sample songs, and then, not satisfied with any of the submissions, asked two of the applicants who had never met one another to collaborate. One of them, Kevin Schroeder, was a veteran musical theater translator whose proposal was clear but cautious; the other was Sera Finale, a rapper-turned-songwriter whose proposal was imaginative but imprecise.

“Kevin was like the kindergarten teacher, and I was that child who wanted to run in every direction and be punky,” said Finale, who hadn’t been to the theater since seeing “Peter Pan” as a child and had to look up “Hamilton” on Wikipedia. “If you have an open mic in Kreuzberg,” he said, referring to a hip Berlin neighborhood, “and you’re standing there with a blunt, normally you don’t go to a musical later in the night.”

Both of them were wary of working together. “I thought, ‘What does he know?’” Schroeder said. “And he thought, ‘I’ll show this musical theater guy.’”

But they gave it a go. They wrote three songs together, and then flew to New York to pitch them to Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics for “Hamilton.” Miranda can curse and coo in German (his wife is half Austrian), but that’s about it; he surprised the would-be translators by showing up for their meeting with his wife’s Austrian cousin.

“Lin is a smart guy,” Finale said, joking that the presence of the cousin ensured “that I don’t rap cooking recipes or the telephone book.”

Miranda had been on the other side once — he translated some of the lyrics of “West Side Story” into Spanish for a 2009 Broadway revival — and he remembered observing how that show’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, listened for the sounds of the Spanish words. Miranda applied that experience to the German “Hamilton.”

“I’m going to feel the internal rhyme, or lack of internal rhyme, of which there is a lot in this show, and so it’s important to me whenever that can be maintained without losing comprehensibility,” Miranda said. “That’s part of what makes hip-hop so much fun, are the internal assonances of it, and they did an incredible job of maintaining that.”

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

“helpless”

Original: “I have never been the type to try and grab the spotlight.”
German: “Ich gehör’ zu den’n, die auf der Party gern am rand steh’n.”
Back-translation: “I belong to those who like to stand on the sidelines at parties.”

---

Once Finale and Schroeder got the job, the process was painstaking, reflecting not only the complexity of the original language but also the fact that the show is almost entirely sung-through, meaning there is very little of the spoken dialogue that is generally easier to translate, because it is unconstrained by melody. They tried divvying up the songs and writing separately, but didn’t like the results, so instead they spent a half year sitting across from one another at the kitchen table in Finale’s Berlin apartment, debating ideas until both were satisfied. They would send Miranda and his team proposed German lyrics as well as a literal translation back into English, allowing Miranda to understand how their proposal differed from his original.

Kurt Crowley, an original member of “Hamilton” music team — he was an associate conductor and then the Broadway music director — became the point person for the project. He developed a multicolored spreadsheet tracking the feedback process; not only that, but he set about learning German, first from apps, and then with a tutor.

“A lot of the coaching and music direction I do has to do with the language,” he said. “I couldn’t think of any other way to do my job besides knowing exactly what they were saying.”

In some ways, the wordiness of “Hamilton” proved advantageous. “At least we had all these syllables,” Schroeder said. “It gave us room to play around.”

Hamilton’s hip-hop elements also had benefits, Schroeder said. “If you come from a musical theater background, you’re used to being very correct and precise, but that’s not how rap works,” he said. “You have to find the flow, and you can play around with the beat.”

There were so many variables to consider. Finale ticked off a list: words, syllables, meter, sound, flow and position. They needed to preserve the essential meaning of each element of the show, but also elide some of the more arcane details, and they needed to echo the musicality of the language.

Figures of speech and wordplay rarely survive translation, but Miranda encouraged the translators to come up with their own metaphors. One example that Finale is proud of concerns Hamilton’s fixation on mortality. In English, he says “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.” In German, he will say words meaning, “Every day death is writing between the lines of my diary.”

There were easy pleasures: The youngest Schuyler sister’s signature line, “And Peggy,” translated readily to “Und Peggy.” But for the eldest Schuyler sister, lyrics got more complicated: In “Satisfied,” a rapid-fire song set at Hamilton’s wedding, “I feel like there’s a thousand extra words they added to it,” said Chasity Crisp, the actress playing Angelica. “I’m still trying to learn how to breathe in the number. It’s incredibly fast. But there’s no other way you can do it — otherwise you wouldn’t be telling the story right.”

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

“the schuyler sisters”

Original: “I’m looking for a mind at work.”
German: “Ich will ‘nen Mann, bei dem was läuft.”
Back-translation: “I want a man who has got something going on.”

---

A few English phrases — well-known to fans, repeated often, and easy to understand — remain, including a reference to New York as “the greatest city in the world,” as do some English titles and American name pronunciations.

But most of the quotes from American musicals and rap songs are gone; in their place are references to the German hip-hop scene, including a description of Hamilton and his friends as “die fantasticschen Vier,” which means “the fantastic four” but is also the name of a band from Stuttgart, plus a moment when Burr says to Angelica, “You are a babe — I’d like to drink your bath water,” which is a line in a classic German rap song.

There were, of course, disagreements along the way — over tone (an initial translation described the West Indies, where Hamilton grew up, as “filthy,” which Miranda rejected as going too far), and content: The translators, for rhyming reasons, wanted Eliza, angry over her husband’s infidelity, to tell him, in German, “All this shall burn” rather than “I hope you burn.” Miranda sacrificed the rhyme to preserve her personalized fury.

An unexpected factor was the way that the translation affected choreography. Much of the show’s movement echoes words in the score; as those words changed, there was a risk that the movement would not make sense. For example: Initially the translators proposed to replace “The room where it happens” with a German phrase meaning “behind closed doors,” which they thought was a clearer image for the German audience. But the choreography of that song suggests a room-like space, so the choreographer, Andy Blankenbuehler, balked, and the original concept stayed. The song is now called “In diesem Zimmer,” meaning “in this room.”

But Blankenbuehler also saw — well, heard — one attribute of German that was a bonus: its percussive sound. “The thing I love is the consonants are so guttural and aggressive,” he said. “Right away it sounds awesome — it sounds like the movement.”

The principal cast members are all fluent in German, and many of them were skeptical that the translation could be done effectively. “At the beginning I was afraid that they won’t get the essence of what ‘Hamilton’ is — that they wouldn’t get these little nuances, the play on words and the intelligence of it all,” Crisp said.

Fans were worried too, and weighed in on social media. “People are skeptical when something really cool is being put into German,” said Ivy Quainoo, the actress playing Eliza. “Hamilton has all these New York rap references, and this East Coast swagger — how is this going to translate?”

The German cast is the most international ever assembled for a “Hamilton” production, hailing from 13 countries, reflecting the degree to which Hamburg has become a magnet for European musical theater performers, and also the wide search the producers needed to conduct to find German-speaking musical theater performers of color.

Miranda said assembling a diverse cast was his biggest concern about staging the show in Hamburg. “The image of Germany in the world was not of a very heterogenous society,” he said. “That was my only hesitation, born of my own ignorance.”

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

“my shot”

Original: “I am not throwing away my shot.”
German: “Mann, ich hab’ nur diesen einen Schuss.”
Back-translation: “Man, I’ve only got this one shot.”

---

Many of the actors are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, giving particular poignancy to the show’s reliable applause line, “Immigrants: We get the job done.” Quainoo, playing Eliza, is a Berliner whose parents are from Ghana; Jorolan’s parents moved to Switzerland from the Philippines. Hamilton is played by Benet Monteiro, a Brazilian who moved to Hamburg 12 years ago to join the cast of “The Lion King”; Burr is played by Gino Emnes, who was born in the Netherlands to a mother from Aruba and a father from Suriname.

Monteiro and Emnes have had long careers in musical theater in Germany, but some of the members of the cast are newer to the genre. The roles of Hercules Mulligan and James Madison are played by a German rapper named Redchild, whose father is from Benin. “I had a very negative view of musical theater,” he said. “To me it was a quite limited genre, and I didn’t have high hopes.” But he heard about “Hamilton” from a friend, watched it on Disney+, and decided to audition.

Very few of the performers had actually seen an in-person production of “Hamilton.” “I was in New York, and I wanted to, but it was too expensive,” Crisp said.

Crisp represents another demographic slice of the cast: a child of an American serviceman. She was born in Mississippi but her father was stationed in Berlin when she was just a year old, and she has spent her whole life in Germany. Charles Simmons, the singer playing Washington, is originally from Kansas City, Mo., but his father, a soldier, was twice stationed in Germany, and Simmons has made the country his home. “It’s fun to tell the story of my birthplace to my place of residence,” he said.

Many cast members said they experienced racism growing up in Europe. “People only saw me as the Asian girl,” Jorolan said. And Redchild said he would often be asked if he was adopted. “People do not think you can be German,” he said.

Those experiences have informed the way they think about “Hamilton.” “I’m playing a white slave owner, and it feels weird because I know that parts of my family have been slaves,” Redchild said. And Emnes noted, “I think in the States and London, the discussion about seeing diversity onstage is much older, and developed. In Europe, it’s a very young discussion.”

But all said just being in the rehearsal room was striking. “It’s very exciting that we have the cast that we have, even though Germany is a very white country,” Simmons said. “The whole notion of people of color playing white people is pretty revolutionary.”

The path to Hamburg for American and British musicals is well-worn; it began in 1986, with a production of “Cats.” Stage Entertainment opened “The Lion King” here in 2001; Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that also operates two Broadway houses, is the most recent player, with a German-language production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” (which is not a musical, but sells like one).

The commercial theater scene stands out in Germany, where much stage work is done by government-funded institutions that often present avant-garde plays. But Michael Otremba, the chief executive of Hamburg’s tourism agency, said musical theater serves an important audience. “This is not the mass of German people who have read Goethe and Schiller,” he said. “There is also this market for light entertainment. And ‘Hamilton’ helps this genre to prove they are more than Andrew Lloyd Webber and Disney.”

Hamburg is overshadowed by Berlin and Munich as a tourist destination, but visitorship here has been growing: In 2001 the city had 4.8 million overnight visitors, and by 2019 it was up to 15.4 million, Otremba said. And culture is an important part of the attraction. The city frequently notes its place in Beatles history (the band performed in clubs here); it has just opened a striking new concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie, that has been embraced by locals and tourists; and then there are the big shows here from the United States and Britain.

“The musicals are a pillar for the development of tourism,” Otremba said. “All the marketing for these productions is enormous, and every time they promote their shows, they mention Hamburg.”

Once the American team moves on, day-to-day oversight of “Hamilton” will fall to Denise Obedekah, a German performer whose father is from Liberia. Obedekah was a dancer in multiple German shows — most recently, “Tina” — but was ready for a change.

“The musical theater audience in Germany is a little conservative,” Obedekah said. “For a very long time, when musical theater was produced in Germany, it was done in a very safe way,” she added. “Producers need to be more brave, and educate our audience to new material. I know this is a risk, because we don’t know if the audience is going to react in the way that they did in the States or in England. But it’s definitely necessary. ”

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They Translated ‘Hamilton’ Into German. Was It Easy? Nein. - The New York Times - Translation

HAMBURG, Germany — “Hamilton” is a mouthful, even in English. Forty-seven songs; more than 20,000 words; fast-paced lyrics, abundant wordplay, complex rhyming patterns, plus allusions not only to hip-hop and musical theater but also to arcane aspects of early American history.

So imagine the challenge, then, of adapting the story of America’s first treasury secretary for a German-speaking audience — preserving the rhythm, the sound, and the sensibility of the original musical while translating its dense libretto into a language characterized by multisyllabic compound nouns and sentences that often end with verbs, and all in a society that has minimal familiarity with the show’s subject matter.

For the last four years — a timeline prolonged, like so many others, by the coronavirus pandemic — a team of translators has been working with the “Hamilton” creators to develop a German version, the first production of the juggernaut musical in a language other than English. The German-speaking cast — most of them actors of color, reflecting the show’s defining decision to retell America’s revolutionary origins with the voices of today’s diverse society — is now in the final days of rehearsal; previews begin Sept. 24 and the opening is scheduled to take place Oct. 6.

The production is an important test for “Hamilton,” which already has six English-language productions running in North America, Britain and Australia, and is hoping to follow Germany with a Spanish version in Madrid and Mexico City. But whether a translated “Hamilton” will succeed remains to be seen.

Hamburg has emerged, somewhat improbably, as a commercial theater destination — the third biggest city for musical theater in the world, after New York and London — with a sizable market of German-speaking tourists. The market began with “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” and Disney shows are a big draw: “The Lion King” and “Frozen” are now playing side-by-side on the south bank of the Elbe River, accessible by a five-minute ferry ride.

But less familiar shows have had a harder time here — “Kinky Boots” closed after a year. Sure, there are hard-core German “Hamilton” fans (some of them upset that the show is being performed in a different language from that of the cast album they love), but there are also plenty of Germans who have never even heard of Alexander Hamilton.

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

“history has its eyes on you”

Original: “History has its eyes on you.”
German: “Die Geschichte wird dabei Zeuge sein.”
Back-translation: “History will be witness.”

---

“It’s not like ‘Frozen,’ which everybody knows,” said Simone Linhof, the artistic producer of Stage Entertainment, an Amsterdam-based production company that operates four theaters in Hamburg and has the license to present “Hamilton” in German. Stage Entertainment is putting “Hamilton” in its smallest Hamburg venue, a 1,400 seat house in the lively St. Pauli district. “‘Hamilton’ is more challenging,” Linhof said.

The German cast has already adopted its own take on the show: Whereas in New York, the musical is celebrated for its dramatization of America’s founding, almost every actor interviewed here described it as a universal human story about the rise and fall of a gifted but flawed man.

“People should stop focusing on that it is American history, and focus more on the relationship between the characters,” said Mae Ann Jorolan, the Swiss actress playing Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds. “‘Hamilton’ is all about having the drive to achieve something.”

International productions have become an important contributor to the immense profitability of a handful of shows birthed on Broadway or in the West End, and they are often staged in the vernacular to make them more accessible. “The Phantom of the Opera,” for example, has been performed in 17 languages.

For “Hamilton,” Stage Entertainment executives invited translators to apply for the job by sending in sample songs, and then, not satisfied with any of the submissions, asked two of the applicants who had never met one another to collaborate. One of them, Kevin Schroeder, was a veteran musical theater translator whose proposal was clear but cautious; the other was Sera Finale, a rapper-turned-songwriter whose proposal was imaginative but imprecise.

“Kevin was like the kindergarten teacher, and I was that child who wanted to run in every direction and be punky,” said Finale, who hadn’t been to the theater since seeing “Peter Pan” as a child and had to look up “Hamilton” on Wikipedia. “If you have an open mic in Kreuzberg,” he said, referring to a hip Berlin neighborhood, “and you’re standing there with a blunt, normally you don’t go to a musical later in the night.”

Both of them were wary of working together. “I thought, ‘What does he know?’” Schroeder said. “And he thought, ‘I’ll show this musical theater guy.’”

But they gave it a go. They wrote three songs together, and then flew to New York to pitch them to Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics for “Hamilton.” Miranda can curse and coo in German (his wife is half Austrian), but that’s about it; he surprised the would-be translators by showing up for their meeting with his wife’s Austrian cousin.

“Lin is a smart guy,” Finale said, joking that the presence of the cousin ensured “that I don’t rap cooking recipes or the telephone book.”

Miranda had been on the other side once — he translated some of the lyrics of “West Side Story” into Spanish for a 2009 Broadway revival — and he remembered observing how that show’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, listened for the sounds of the Spanish words. Miranda applied that experience to the German “Hamilton.”

“I’m going to feel the internal rhyme, or lack of internal rhyme, of which there is a lot in this show, and so it’s important to me whenever that can be maintained without losing comprehensibility,” Miranda said. “That’s part of what makes hip-hop so much fun, are the internal assonances of it, and they did an incredible job of maintaining that.”

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

“helpless”

Original: “I have never been the type to try and grab the spotlight.”
German: “Ich gehör’ zu den’n, die auf der Party gern am rand steh’n.”
Back-translation: “I belong to those who like to stand on the sidelines at parties.”

---

Once Finale and Schroeder got the job, the process was painstaking, reflecting not only the complexity of the original language but also the fact that the show is almost entirely sung-through, meaning there is very little of the spoken dialogue that is generally easier to translate, because it is unconstrained by melody. They tried divvying up the songs and writing separately, but didn’t like the results, so instead they spent a half year sitting across from one another at the kitchen table in Finale’s Berlin apartment, debating ideas until both were satisfied. They would send Miranda and his team proposed German lyrics as well as a literal translation back into English, allowing Miranda to understand how their proposal differed from his original.

Kurt Crowley, an original member of “Hamilton” music team — he was an associate conductor and then the Broadway music director — became the point person for the project. He developed a multicolored spreadsheet tracking the feedback process; not only that, but he set about learning German, first from apps, and then with a tutor.

“A lot of the coaching and music direction I do has to do with the language,” he said. “I couldn’t think of any other way to do my job besides knowing exactly what they were saying.”

In some ways, the wordiness of “Hamilton” proved advantageous. “At least we had all these syllables,” Schroeder said. “It gave us room to play around.”

Hamilton’s hip-hop elements also had benefits, Schroeder said. “If you come from a musical theater background, you’re used to being very correct and precise, but that’s not how rap works,” he said. “You have to find the flow, and you can play around with the beat.”

There were so many variables to consider. Finale ticked off a list: words, syllables, meter, sound, flow and position. They needed to preserve the essential meaning of each element of the show, but also elide some of the more arcane details, and they needed to echo the musicality of the language.

Figures of speech and wordplay rarely survive translation, but Miranda encouraged the translators to come up with their own metaphors. One example that Finale is proud of concerns Hamilton’s fixation on mortality. In English, he says “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.” In German, he will say words meaning, “Every day death is writing between the lines of my diary.”

There were easy pleasures: The youngest Schuyler sister’s signature line, “And Peggy,” translated readily to “Und Peggy.” But for the eldest Schuyler sister, lyrics got more complicated: In “Satisfied,” a rapid-fire song set at Hamilton’s wedding, “I feel like there’s a thousand extra words they added to it,” said Chasity Crisp, the actress playing Angelica. “I’m still trying to learn how to breathe in the number. It’s incredibly fast. But there’s no other way you can do it — otherwise you wouldn’t be telling the story right.”

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

“the schuyler sisters”

Original: “I’m looking for a mind at work.”
German: “Ich will ‘nen Mann, bei dem was läuft.”
Back-translation: “I want a man who has got something going on.”

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A few English phrases — well-known to fans, repeated often, and easy to understand — remain, including a reference to New York as “the greatest city in the world,” as do some English titles and American name pronunciations.

But most of the quotes from American musicals and rap songs are gone; in their place are references to the German hip-hop scene, including a description of Hamilton and his friends as “die fantasticschen Vier,” which means “the fantastic four” but is also the name of a band from Stuttgart, plus a moment when Burr says to Angelica, “You are a babe — I’d like to drink your bath water,” which is a line in a classic German rap song.

There were, of course, disagreements along the way — over tone (an initial translation described the West Indies, where Hamilton grew up, as “filthy,” which Miranda rejected as going too far), and content: The translators, for rhyming reasons, wanted Eliza, angry over her husband’s infidelity, to tell him, in German, “All this shall burn” rather than “I hope you burn.” Miranda sacrificed the rhyme to preserve her personalized fury.

An unexpected factor was the way that the translation affected choreography. Much of the show’s movement echoes words in the score; as those words changed, there was a risk that the movement would not make sense. For example: Initially the translators proposed to replace “The room where it happens” with a German phrase meaning “behind closed doors,” which they thought was a clearer image for the German audience. But the choreography of that song suggests a room-like space, so the choreographer, Andy Blankenbuehler, balked, and the original concept stayed. The song is now called “In diesem Zimmer,” meaning “in this room.”

But Blankenbuehler also saw — well, heard — one attribute of German that was a bonus: its percussive sound. “The thing I love is the consonants are so guttural and aggressive,” he said. “Right away it sounds awesome — it sounds like the movement.”

The principal cast members are all fluent in German, and many of them were skeptical that the translation could be done effectively. “At the beginning I was afraid that they won’t get the essence of what ‘Hamilton’ is — that they wouldn’t get these little nuances, the play on words and the intelligence of it all,” Crisp said.

Fans were worried too, and weighed in on social media. “People are skeptical when something really cool is being put into German,” said Ivy Quainoo, the actress playing Eliza. “Hamilton has all these New York rap references, and this East Coast swagger — how is this going to translate?”

The German cast is the most international ever assembled for a “Hamilton” production, hailing from 13 countries, reflecting the degree to which Hamburg has become a magnet for European musical theater performers, and also the wide search the producers needed to conduct to find German-speaking musical theater performers of color.

Miranda said assembling a diverse cast was his biggest concern about staging the show in Hamburg. “The image of Germany in the world was not of a very heterogenous society,” he said. “That was my only hesitation, born of my own ignorance.”

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

Florian Thoss for The New York Times

“my shot”

Original: “I am not throwing away my shot.”
German: “Mann, ich hab’ nur diesen einen Schuss.”
Back-translation: “Man, I’ve only got this one shot.”

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Many of the actors are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, giving particular poignancy to the show’s reliable applause line, “Immigrants: We get the job done.” Quainoo, playing Eliza, is a Berliner whose parents are from Ghana; Jorolan’s parents moved to Switzerland from the Philippines. Hamilton is played by Benet Monteiro, a Brazilian who moved to Hamburg 12 years ago to join the cast of “The Lion King”; Burr is played by Gino Emnes, who was born in the Netherlands to a mother from Aruba and a father from Suriname.

Monteiro and Emnes have had long careers in musical theater in Germany, but some of the members of the cast are newer to the genre. The roles of Hercules Mulligan and James Madison are played by a German rapper named Redchild, whose father is from Benin. “I had a very negative view of musical theater,” he said. “To me it was a quite limited genre, and I didn’t have high hopes.” But he heard about “Hamilton” from a friend, watched it on Disney+, and decided to audition.

Very few of the performers had actually seen an in-person production of “Hamilton.” “I was in New York, and I wanted to, but it was too expensive,” Crisp said.

Crisp represents another demographic slice of the cast: a child of an American serviceman. She was born in Mississippi but her father was stationed in Berlin when she was just a year old, and she has spent her whole life in Germany. Charles Simmons, the singer playing Washington, is originally from Kansas City, Mo., but his father, a soldier, was twice stationed in Germany, and Simmons has made the country his home. “It’s fun to tell the story of my birthplace to my place of residence,” he said.

Many cast members said they experienced racism growing up in Europe. “People only saw me as the Asian girl,” Jorolan said. And Redchild said he would often be asked if he was adopted. “People do not think you can be German,” he said.

Those experiences have informed the way they think about “Hamilton.” “I’m playing a white slave owner, and it feels weird because I know that parts of my family have been slaves,” Redchild said. And Emnes noted, “I think in the States and London, the discussion about seeing diversity onstage is much older, and developed. In Europe, it’s a very young discussion.”

But all said just being in the rehearsal room was striking. “It’s very exciting that we have the cast that we have, even though Germany is a very white country,” Simmons said. “The whole notion of people of color playing white people is pretty revolutionary.”

The path to Hamburg for American and British musicals is well-worn; it began in 1986, with a production of “Cats.” Stage Entertainment opened “The Lion King” here in 2001; Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that also operates two Broadway houses, is the most recent player, with a German-language production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” (which is not a musical, but sells like one).

The commercial theater scene stands out in Germany, where much stage work is done by government-funded institutions that often present avant-garde plays. But Michael Otremba, the chief executive of Hamburg’s tourism agency, said musical theater serves an important audience. “This is not the mass of German people who have read Goethe and Schiller,” he said. “There is also this market for light entertainment. And ‘Hamilton’ helps this genre to prove they are more than Andrew Lloyd Webber and Disney.”

Hamburg is overshadowed by Berlin and Munich as a tourist destination, but visitorship here has been growing: In 2001 the city had 4.8 million overnight visitors, and by 2019 it was up to 15.4 million, Otremba said. And culture is an important part of the attraction. The city frequently notes its place in Beatles history (the band performed in clubs here); it has just opened a striking new concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie, that has been embraced by locals and tourists; and then there are the big shows here from the United States and Britain.

“The musicals are a pillar for the development of tourism,” Otremba said. “All the marketing for these productions is enormous, and every time they promote their shows, they mention Hamburg.”

Once the American team moves on, day-to-day oversight of “Hamilton” will fall to Denise Obedekah, a German performer whose father is from Liberia. Obedekah was a dancer in multiple German shows — most recently, “Tina” — but was ready for a change.

“The musical theater audience in Germany is a little conservative,” Obedekah said. “For a very long time, when musical theater was produced in Germany, it was done in a very safe way,” she added. “Producers need to be more brave, and educate our audience to new material. I know this is a risk, because we don’t know if the audience is going to react in the way that they did in the States or in England. But it’s definitely necessary. ”

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Six Lyrics That Show Why ‘Hamilton’ Is Tough to Translate - The New York Times - Translation

A direct transfer of words was never going to work for such a complex show. So the team involved got creative.

How does one translate “Hamilton” into another language? That was the challenge facing Sera Finale, a rapper-turned-songwriter, and Kevin Schroeder, a seasoned musical theater translator, when they were asked to collaborate on a German version of the show — the first in a language other than English.

The project turned out to be just as complicated as they had feared: complex rhyme schemes, elaborate wordplay and so many songs. There were drafts and demos and revisions; a member of the “Hamilton” music team, Kurt Crowley, learned German to help coordinate the process, and ultimately Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator, had to approve or reject each line.

Here are six lyrics that demonstrate some of the challenges the team faced as they sought to preserve the meaning and melody of the original, but in a language with different sounds and syntax. The first line is the original English lyric; the second is the German lyric; and the third is the so-called back translation, which is what the German words literally mean in English.

Avoiding Hyperbole

Burr: How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a/Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten/Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor/Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

“Alexander Hamilton” (English)

Gino Emnes

Burr: Wie wird ein Bastard/der vom Schoß einer trostlosen Dirne kroch/Aus ’nem gottverdammten, verlor’nem Loch in der Karibik/Ohne Titel, ohne Mittel, ohne Werte/Am Ende doch ein Held und ein Gelehrter?

(How does a bastard/Who crawled out of the lap of a bleak harlot/From a goddamned, lost hole in the Caribbean/With no title, no means, no merits/In the end still become a hero and a scholar?)

“Alexander Hamilton” (German)

Benet Monteiro

These are the first words from “Alexander Hamilton,” the musical’s opening song, which introduce the title character with a description of his humble upbringing. The challenge here was to maintain the original lyric’s directness without overstating the case or demeaning the West Indies. The original proposed German lyric referred to Hamilton as a “Bastardblag,” an arcane word meaning bastard brat, to his mother as a “Hure,” meaning whore, and to the islands of Hamilton’s upbringing as “verdreckten,” meaning filthy. Miranda thought those words went too far, and asked for them to be dialed back. “The first draft was almost Trumpian,” he said, alluding to a coarse phrase the former president used to refer to Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations. “To me that’s not the intent of the lyric. I never wanted to comment on Nevis, or St. Croix. It was just this really small part of the world. That’s an example of something that could easily get lost in translation if you’re not on it.”

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Quoting Rap Songs

Burr: Ah, so you’ve discussed me/I’m a trust fund, baby, you can trust me.

“The Schuyler Sisters” (English)

Chasity Crisp and Gino Emnes

Burr: Schiess mich über’n Haufen, doch/Du bist’n Babe, ich möcht’ dein Badewasser saufen.

(Shoot me down but/You are a babe, I’d like to drink your bath water.)

“The Schuyler Sisters” (German)

Chasity Crisp and Gino Emnes

The original “Hamilton” score includes a number of quotations from American hip-hop songs. Most of them were cut from the German version because the translations made them unrecognizable. But, in an effort to accomplish the same effect, the translators inserted several quotations from German hip-hop songs into the German score. In a section of the song “The Schuyler Sisters,” when Aaron Burr flirts with Angelica Schuyler, the translators found a place to insert a phrase meaning “You are a babe, I’d like to drink your bath water,” from a 1995 German song “Ja klar,” which was a hit for Sabrina Setlur, who rapped as Schwester S. Miranda, who listened to each German song quoted before approving the citations, said he views “Hamilton” as a love letter to hip-hop, as well as to musical theater, and that he considers the hip-hop quotations as a point of entry for some audience members. “A hip-hop fan who comes in, maybe, with their arms crossed, hears those references and goes ‘OK, the person who wrote this obviously loves this culture and loves the music’,” he said. “And so we wanted to continue to reflect that.”

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New Imagery

Angelica: So this is what it feels like to match wits/With someone at your level! What the hell is the catch?/It’s the feeling of freedom, of seeing the light/It’s Ben Franklin with a key and a kite/You see it right?

“Satisfied” (English)

Chasity Crisp

Angelica: So kribbeln Schmetterlinge, wenn sie starten/Wir beide voll auf einem Level, offene Karten!/Das Herz in den Wolken, ich flieg’ aus der Bahn/Die Füße kommen an den Boden nich’ ran/Mein lieber Schwan!

(So that’s how butterflies tingle when they take off/We’re on the same level, all cards on the table!/My heart in the clouds, I’m thrown off track/My feet don’t touch the floor/My dear swan!)

“Satisfied” (German)

Chasity Crisp

The original language is packed with American metaphors and idioms that just don’t translate. So the translators were given license to come up with their own turns of phrase. This example is from the song “Satisfied,” in which Angelica Schuyler, preparing to toast Hamilton’s marriage to her sister, recalls the first time she met him. The images are completely different (and the references to Ben Franklin are gone) but the meaning remains. “That section sounds fantastic, and gives the same feeling of falling in love for the first time,” Miranda said. “The metaphor may be different, but it keeps its propulsiveness.”

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Prioritizing Meaning

Eliza: You forfeit all rights to my heart/You forfeit the place in our bed/You sleep in your office instead/With only the memories/Of when you were mine/I hope that you burn

“Burn” (English)

Ivy Quainoo

Eliza: Du nahmst dir das recht auf mein Herz/Den Platz hier in unserem Bett/Ich lösch unser leben komplett/Dir bleibt nur die Asche/Du warst einmal mein/Ich hoffe du brennst

(You took the right to my heart from yourself/The place here in our bed/I am erasing our life completely/All that’s left for you is the ashes/You used to be mine once/I hope that you burn)

“Burn” (German)

Ivy Quainoo

There were many moments when Miranda et al. allowed the German translators to bend the original meaning in order to preserve lyricism and melody. But there were other moments when they insisted on literalism, and the end of the song “Burn,” in which Eliza Hamilton expresses her outrage at her husband’s infidelity, was one of those. The translators initially sought to have Eliza repeat “brenn’n,” a shortened form of the word for “burn,” throughout the song. But that meant changing the final line of the song from words meaning “I hope that you burn” to words meaning “All this shall burn.” Miranda rejected that idea, insisting that Eliza direct her anger squarely at her husband. So now the song ends with “brennst,” which is not a perfect echo of the word used earlier in the song, but which preserves the original meaning: “You burn.” “I really just wanted to make sure the last line was personal: ‘It’s not about the world — it’s about you. This is what you did, and these are your consequences’,” Miranda said.

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Protecting Choreography

Hamilton: Teach me how to say goodbye/Rise up, rise up, rise up/Eliza

“The World Was Wide Enough” (English)

Benet Monteiro

Hamilton: Weitergeh’n und Abschied nehm’n/Frei sein, frei sein, frei sein/Eliza

(Move on and say goodbye/Be free, be free, be free/Eliza)

“The World Was Wide Enough” (German)

Benet Monteiro

In the show’s penultimate song, “The World Was Wide Enough,” Hamilton dies. As that moment nears, he repeats the phrase “Rise up,” perhaps alluding to ambition, or revolution, or perseverance, and pictures his wife. The German translators at first proposed a lyric that preserved the internal rhyme of the lyric, but altered its meaning, using the word “leise,” which means quietly, and which beautifully echoes the name “Eliza,” to replace “Rise up.” But choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler objected, because the movement at that moment has the ensemble becoming more active — more “rise up” than “quietly” — and he felt it was important to preserve the relationship between the words and the movement. The translators went back to the drawing board, and came up with something less poetic but more protective of the dance concerns. “The complicating factor is that Andy choreographs to lyric, so when the lyrics underneath the movement have changed, what adjustments have to happen?” Miranda said. “I’m trying to keep those connected.”

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A Pointed Addition

Hamilton: America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me

“The World Was Wide Enough” (English)

Benet Monteiro

Hamilton: America, durch deine Brust pumpt Sklavenblut, Moral und Wut.

(America, through your breast is pounding the blood of slaves, morality and rage.)

“The World Was Wide Enough” (German)

Benet Monteiro

The German translators saw an opportunity to interpolate a reference to America’s troubled history with slavery. “Our version is kind of a German perspective on America,” said Kevin Schroeder, one of the translators. “He’s saying ‘unfinished symphony,’ and that also implies there are some flaws.”

Audio production by Arjen Mensinga and Josephine Sedgwick.

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