This thesis investigates the field of amateur translation in Brazil, with particular emphasis on the translation of Morrissey’s lyrics for understanding purposes in four different sources: magazines, fansites, virtual communities and general websites. It examines whether existing theories on the translation of popular songs (Kelly 1987, and Low, 2003, 2005, 2008) find some resonance in the practice of amateur translators. The collective construction of meaning, and the social acceptance of the Target Text are essential parts of the process. The analysis follows Toury’s (1995) descriptive model in order to systematise how these translators operate. The Brazilian amateur translators’ regularity in the use of particular techniques to render meaning to lyrics for understanding purposes enables the description of their practice as a genre its own. Following the theoretical framework, chapters four, five and six focus on the translation of the main challenges amateur translators of Morrissey’s lyrics face. The translation of cultural aspects proved to be an exercise of creativity in which the translators had to provide equivalents to culture-specific items (Aixelá, 1996) that find no mirror in the target culture. Ambiguous lyrics tended to present translations as varied as the translators’ personal agendas, understanding of the lyrics or target language’s limitations, such as lack of neutral personal pronoun. The different humour and irony styles in source and target culture resulted in every group of translators finding their own strategies to render meaning. As the first project aiming to rationalise amateur translators of lyrics in Brazil, this study represents an attempt to enrich and broaden the discussion on the translation of pop songs, with special attention to the practices of translation for this type of texts in a country where the audience is high dependent on translations in order to understand the lyrics are in great demand.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the themes and values represented in lyrics of progressive country music are significantly different from those of traditional country music. Content analytical techniques were used to determine, first, themes and, second, attitudes reflected in those themes in each type of song. The chi square test of independence was u-ilized, and a difference significant to the .05 level was found between themes and attitudes of lyrics in the two song types.

In a world where online information is growing rapidly, the need for more efficient methods to search for and create music collections is larger than ever. Looking at the most recent trends, the application of machine learning to automate different categorization problems such as genre and mood classification has shown promising results. In this thesis we investigate the problem of classifying explicit music content using machine learning. Different data sets containing lyrics and music metadata, vectorization methods and algorithms including Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbor and Multinomial Naive Bayes are combined to create 32 different configurations. The configurations are then evaluated using precision-recall curves. The investigation shows that the configuration with the lyric data set together with TF-IDF vectorization and Random Forest as algorithm outperforms all other configurations. / I en värld där online-information växer snabbt, ökar behovet av effektivare metoder för att söka i och skapa musiksamlingar. De senaste trenderna visar att användandet av maskininlärning för att automatisera olika kategoriseringsproblem så som klassificering av genre och humör har gett lovande resultat. I denna rapport undersöker vi problemet att klassificera stötande innehåll i musik med maskininlärning. Genom att kombinera olika datamängder med låttexter och musik-metadata, vektoriseringsmetoder samt algoritmer så som Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbor och Multinomial Naive Bayes skapas 32 olika konfigurationer som tränas och utvärderas med precision-recall-kurvor. Resultaten visar att konfigurationen med datamängden som endast innehåller låttexter tillsammans med TF-IDF-vektorisering och algoritmen Random Forest presterar bättre än alla andra konfigurationer.

The aim of the study is to examine how songs are included in Swedish EFL coursebooks aimed at the courses English 5 and English 6, what functions they serve and what this communicates about the pedagogical value of songs for EFL teaching and learning. This study also aims to examine what differences there are in the inclusion and usage of songs targeting the different courses. The material was gathered through a content analysis of six coursebooks, three aimed at English 5 (Viewpoints 1, Solid Gold 1, and Blueprint A Version 3.0) and three intended for use in English 6 (Viewpoints 2, Solid Gold 2, and Blueprint B Version 2.0). The books were analysed by applying the concepts of explicit and implicit communications of pedagogical value through the lens of Krippendorff’s approach to textual analysis (Krippendorff, 2019, p. 29). The results show that most differences in the inclusion and usage of songs in the coursebooks targeting the different courses relate to how songs are included, but also that there are significant differences in how the songs are used. Furthermore, the results also show that the inclusion and usage of songs in the examined coursebooks convey conflicting messages about their pedagogical value. The usage of songs shows that there is a reliance on the intrinsic pedagogical value of songs for EFL teaching and learning. Nonetheless, songs are used sparingly in relation to other text types in the coursebooks.

The topic of the present paper is the translation of the French chanson into Czech. The paper focuses on the analysis of eight lyrics from the repertoire of G. Brassens, J. Brel and E. Piaf (the translators are J. Dědeček, P. Kopta, M. Balejová and S. E. Brandejsová). The paper examines prevailing functional characteristics of the originals and the extent to which these have been maintained in the various Czech translations. Special attention is given to the relation between semantic accuracy and "successful" translations, meaning here translations which maintain the prevailing functional characteristics of the original. Preceding the analysis is the theoretical part of the paper in which we introduce some terms and theoretical models applied by theoreticians in the field of translation (J. Levý, K. Reiss, P. Low), insofar as these terms and models are relevant to the topic.

This essay is an account of an investigation of conceptual metaphors of LOVE in two albums by singer Mariah Carey. It also includes an investigation of if LOVE metaphors were used differently at the beginning of her career from how they are used twenty-four years later. The study is based on the singles of Carey's debut album and those of her latest album. The analysis showed that although the songs are separated by approximately twenty years the LOVE metaphors most reflected in the song lyrics were the same in both albums. The results also showed that the source concept which was most typically used overall was also reflected to describe the target concept in both albums. However, the variation of LOVE metaphors was greater in the singles of her debut album.

We explore a dataset of almost half a million English song lyrics through three different processes - automatic evaluation, visualization, and generation. We create our own rhyme detector, using the EM algorithm with several improvements and adjustable parameters. This may, in some cases, replace human evaluators that cannot be used, for example, after each iteration of the lyrics generator to evaluate its improvement. By creating a web-page visualization of the results with interesting matrix rhyme highlighting, we make our evaluation accessible to the public. We discuss interesting genre differences discovered by applying our automatic evaluation on the entire dataset. Finally, we explore lyrics generation using state-of-the-art GPT-2.

This thesis will be examining current song lyrics in popular and scholarly way to professionally judge possibilities of real impact of this lyrics to a historical consciousness of the listener. Then it will be following up the reasons why are historical topics so frequentative in song lyrics, various ways of interpretations, way od misinterpretations, influence of used instrument like language, form of the performance, sings, composition, mass character etc… To every each chosen interpret will be dedicated concrete and specific space in this thesis by the amount of the historical impact in his work. The result of this thesis should be very integrated and educated view to this subject of interest.

Music is a ubiquitous part of society and has some capacity for spurring social change by stirring emotions with people. The music genre of punk is overtly political and promotes different kinds of social change, and all this makes punk relevant to study for the social sciences and humanities. However, on one hand, research suggests that punk scenes are masculinist and partly excludes women. On the other hand, other studies point to possibilities for alternative constructions of gender to take form through punk. Furthermore, research on punk is comprehensive, but the Swedish subgenre of trallpunk seems to have been overlooked in studies. Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate how masculinity is constructed in trallpunk. Drawing on a discourse analytical approach, supplemented by the concepts of performativity and hegemonic masculinity, song lyrics and interview data are analyzed in order to discern constructions of gender in trallpunk. The main conclusion is that trallpunk carries a form of transformative potential pointing to the transformation of gender discourses. Such a potential suggests that restricting and oppressive discourses of gender and hegemonic masculinity could eventually be eradicated, which would be an important step towards a more open-minded and inclusive society.

Detta är ett självständigt arbete som handlar om hur jag utforskar min egen övning där jag memorerar texter ur två olika sånger under två separata veckor. Arbetet genomförs ur ett sociokulturellt perspektiv och grundar sig i tidigare forskning och självständiga arbeten om minne och musicerande utantill. Arbetet har dokumenterats genom videoobservationer och loggboksanteckningar under övningstillfällen hösten 2022. Resultatet presenterar olika teman som observerats och svarar där igenom på mina frågeställningar vilka redskap jag använder mig av och vilka faktorer som påverkar svårighetsgraden på lärandet av olika texter. I diskussionen sätter jag resultatet i relation till tidigare litteratur kring ämnet, forskning och det sociokulturella perspektivet. / This is a self-study about how I study my own practice where I memorized two different song lyrics in two separate weeks. The study is made with a sociocultural perspective and is based on previous research and studies about memory and playing music without sheet music. The study was being documented through video recordings and notes in a logbook in the autumn of 2022. The result presents different themes that came to be observed and they answer my research questions about which cultural tools I use and what it is that affects the degree of difficulty when learning song lyrics. In the discussion I put my result in relation to the previous literature, research and the sociocultural perspective.