Translating The "Verbal Poem":a Report On The Necessity, Value And Techniques Of Translating Lvrice Of American Hip Pop Music

Hip hop music, also called rap music, is a music genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted. From its birth in the belly of the Bronx until the mid’70s, hip hop was largely about the self esteem of the black community and a discussion about societal problems. However with the globalization of economies and the commercialization of the music industry in the21st century, hip hop music, taking root from a local African-American community has branched out to the world and earned its fair share of popularity among today’s ear buds-obsessed youth and attention from the literary community with its distinctive beats and poetic albeit controversial lyrics. As pervasive as it is, hip hop music has an army of critics from literary classicists to feminist activists attacking its integrity because of the linguistic errors and misogynistic content in its lyrics.Despite its mixed reputation, hip hop music is acclaimed by Chinese pop culture lovers and English learners, manifesting the impact of this particular genre of music on a different culture. And good translation of these hip hop lyrics, which is scarcely seen in China at the time, is one of the most important ways to transmit this impact across cultures.This paper sets out as its mission to argue the necessity and value of translating the lyrics to hip hop music. Guided by the Skopos theory, the relevance theory and language transfer theory, this paper puts forward techniques with which translators of hip hop lyrics can do justice to the authenticity of hip hop music with a good handle of its linguistic complications and feminist controversies.What sets this paper apart from others is that it closely observes a language sector whose resources remain untapped by the translation community, and makes some bold efforts in searching for the techniques for translating these lyrics. The two techniques discussed and found at the end of the paper not only shows the profound value of translating hip hop lyrics, but gives assistance to similar studies in the future to some extent.