Watching Eurovision is one of my guilty pleasures. The music is often terrible, but it’s always entertaining, and as a linguist, I enjoy listening to songs performed in different languages.
Up until about seven years ago, around 80% of entries were performed in English, but recently the tide has turned, as this Guardian article explains.
Italian rock band Måneskin are among the acts who’ve recently won the contest with a native language song. Their 2021 winning single, ‘Zitti E Buoni!’, was also the first Italian-language song in more than 30 years to reach the top 20 of the UK Singles Chart (before that it was Pavarotti’s ‘Nessun Dorma’).
An expert interviewed by the Guardian suggested that the trend for native language entries might be due to the rise in machine translation, which means that acts no longer need to be sung in English to be understood.
The problem is that many of these translations are flawed. A recent study comparing the official translations of Eurovision song lyrics to AI translations found that AI did such a poor job that it actually changed the tone and meaning of the songs – a good reminder of why you shouldn’t trust ChatGPT or Google Translate with important translations.
My team can provide translation in more than 150 languages for everything from legal or financial documents to annual reports and marketing content.