 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Kayla Collingwood and I'm a master of music student studying classical performance voice. I'm a mezzo-soprano classical singer. My research focuses on translations and how they're utilized in the repertoire of the classical vocal world. This topic came about as I earlier in the year performed a role in New Zealand Opera's production of Mozart's The Magic Flute and it was performed in English. It's very common for foreign language operas to be translated into various languages in order to make the work more accessible. Songs are also commonly translated and have been throughout history. This is most commonly done by either translating pre-existing literary works or translating something in a way that fits with music when it's a language which has already been set to music and also sometimes the text transmitted to the audience through the use of serre titles and opera or translations in the program. Tonight, I would like to share with you Ravel's Chant Populaire, a set of songs by French composer Maurice Ravel. They were their respective winners in the 1910 Maison du Lide composition competition in Moscow. The four songs are settings of existing folk songs and are in four different dialects Galician, Limousin, Neapolitan and Yiddish. As part of the competition, the songs are also published with Russian and French translations and I have looked at the French specifically. The Spanish translation into French is interesting as it is very different and the Hebrew song combines both Yiddish and Hebrew and has completely different origins to the other dialects. I will be performing them in my recital in December as well. So if you want to hear them again, you can come along, and they're also a case study in my thesis. They will be performed in the original languages and unfortunately, as we were unable to get a piano in here, I've had to do a recorded performance this morning, bear last minute, so bear with me with the quality. Yeah, I'll just go and play them through there. Thank you. I was just wondering, how do you find these pieces if sung in, say, the French translations versus the well, the Russian, for example, which we obviously haven't heard, but you know, how do they function differently? I had a go at singing them through in French and it's very different, particularly for that one. It's just a completely different language structure and there's so much history behind the language as well. You can't compare the two really. And translation itself is such an art as you can never get a perfect translation. So you're always going to lose some of the essence that you get in the original language. The Spanish one there is. The Spanish and the French, although they're fairly similar in origin, they're both Latin based languages. I don't know what the French decided to do, but the story is completely different. At the very end of that one, there's a line about they go like roses and they return like negroes to do with the colour of the skin, obviously. And somehow the French ended up talking about that they go like roses and they come back like thorns. So there's things like that, which just you lose the entire sense of what the Spanish was trying to say. Oh, thank you very much. It would have been great to see the performance live. That's and when you talk about loss and translation, you also lose a little bit. I think when you see it on the screen rather than in real life. But I mean, given the limitations of albeño, it's a bit of a shame. Your research does touch upon a very important point and that anybody who's dealing with the need to translate material, especially if you're in the humanities dealing with our ancient languages is always a problem of trying to get the the feeling of the original meaning across into the whatever language you're translating it in. But in your case, this is going to sound very simple, so excuse me, my esteemed colleagues. Couldn't you still maintain the original language but provide the audience with a translated copy? I mean that way you'd still be able to keep the original, yet still potentially get the meaning across in a way. Yes, you can do that and they often do. Often you'll have the translations in the printed program or above the stage. The feedback that we often get about that is that it's distracting. And when it comes to being in the program, a lot of people don't actually read the programs, so that is a problem as well. Yes, if you're an academic and you arrive in plenty of time for the concert, we can give you the program and go for your life, read it. Yes and no. When you're translating, you can choose whether to use a more harsh word or a gentler word related to the context of the audience you're trying to reach. That particular translation that we used was by a Scottish translator. He wrote it for a specific kind of audience. A lot of people did find that it was difficult to hear those concepts of racism and sexism. So thrust in your face, whereas you can hide away from it a bit more when it's in another language. It was always written into the story of the magic flute, but you can't hide from it when it's in your own language. So in itself is a translation of the message.