A Collected Memoir

I played a small part in the Creative Commons (CC) launch event in Taiwan.

The event took place on a Saturday in September 2004. I recently joined OpenFoundry, a free software advocacy funded and run by Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s top research institute. Many of my colleagues were also members of CC Taiwan, and the preparation for the event was well under way that late summer.

I volunteered to translate the lyrics of “Welcome to Sing My Song” into English. The song is written by Pigheadskin, known for his irreverent ways of addressing difficult social issues, and the musician himself would be performing it on stage at the event. I no longer recall exactly what prompted the translation, but someone must have asked how we could help the guests understand the lyrics if they didn’t speak Mandarin or Taiwanese. The song is Pigheadskin’s own tribute to the artworks that influenced him. More importantly, it is also about how we never just hear one voice but rather a confluence of many: in one verse, the speaker tells us how he once came across someone singing what he thought was Black American rap, but it turned out to be a protest song entirely in Taiwanese. That, in turn, led to the speaker’s discovery of more Taiwanese hits and his own attempts to imitate—and then deviate from—those cultural landmarks. He wouldn’t have been the artist he wanted to be without the freedom to derive his own voice from those who came before him, and the song sees future artists making use of his work as the best thing the work will have achieved.

Translating the lyrics was a good challenge. The song is written in Taiwanese Hokkien (often Taiwanese for short), and while some works it refers to have Mandarin titles, many others have names that are actually in Taiwanese but are often written in a way as if they were in Mandarin. Transcribing those names in romanized Mandarin would not reflect what they truly are. As it happened, I was picking up Taiwanese Romanization at the time, and I used the opportunity to learn, for myself for the first time, how to say the name of an artist or the title of a song in the way they were meant to be pronounced. I also happened to have recently started an open source software project that enabled people to create their own input methods, and it was the experience of learning to translate the names in Pigheadskin’s lyrics that helped me understand the importance of having input methods for languages other than Mandarin that were spoken in Taiwan.

I did take some liberties translating a few names and I had tremendous fun with it. One song that profoundly affected Pigheadskin’s speaker was “E-poo ê tsi̍t-tshut hì” by Tân Bîng-tsiong. Its title refers to a Taiwanese tradition where locals commission a theater troupe to perform a repertoire piece to express gratitude for the gods’ blessings. The song sets up its stage in a downpouring summer afternoon. There is no one watching the performers play, but the show must go on: it is, supposedly, a work to be performed in front of and for the sake of the the gods. The title literally means “an act in the afternoon,” and I wondered if I could do something to connect it to other works that are set in those hours. I decided to switch to another language, so: “Une pièce de l’après-midi.”

Over a decade later, in 2015, I got a message from Pigheadskin. He recently recorded a version of the song, and told me that the English translation also made it into the subtitles. In 2022, CC Taiwan’s Dr. Tyng-Ruey Chuang connected us once again and asked if I would be open to revising the translation for a new performance. I checked Pigheadskin’s 2014 video and there were already a few changes he made himself and they improved the text by a lot. The only change I really made was towards the end, when the speaker invites everyone to join his effort and make good use of his song. “Hiòng-tsiân kiânn (march forward)!” exhorts the speaker, and the words invoke a 1990 pop hit from another renowned Taiwanese icon, Lim Giong. I had put “et voilà on y va” there, although looking back it could have been something like “en avant!” In the revised version I sent to Pigheadskin and Dr. Chuang, I had a different idea: “vamos juntos” — it had the right vibe for the times we were living through. We are in this together, this commons, and that the CC badges appear in so many places today shows that it strikes a chord. I was glad I made a contribution.

(The 2014 version of Pigheadskin’s “Welcome to Sing My Song” can be found at https://youtu.be/GsKVVMXg7Fs.)