TranslatinG VIETNAMESE SONG INTO ENGLISH

From the moment Personal Project was introduced, I knew exactly the topic I wanted to do. I have been translating songs since 9th grade. When I moved to Jakarta, I knew my English was not good enough, partly because English is my second language, and my English vocabulary is quite weak. Many teachers have advised me to read books or watch movies to improve, but books and movies are not my preference at all. So I came up with this "topic" and implemented it myself. Even the process takes a lot of time to complete but I always consider it as a hobby to improve my English vocab. I love to listen to music, every day, every free time I would listen to my favorite soundtrack while lip-syncing and dancing. Then I thought about the idea of translating Vietnamese to English, it would be educating as well as entertaining. During the 2021 summer, I usually spend my time translating my favorite Vietnamese song into English. There are many times I failed to post my translations to social media because I wasn’t ready to work with social media yet, I afraid I might make a mistake and the viewers might criticize me, but now thanks to Personal Project and a bit of benefit of a doubt, I am motivated to upgrade this little hobby of mine and ready jump out of my comfort zone! My learning goal is to learn and improve my English and video editing skills. From my past experiences, translating lyrics has helped me learn many esoteric English words. Recently, I have tried to edit basic videos for my parents. Developing this skill will increase my video aesthetics and qualities.

Product Goal

From the moment Personal Project was introduced, I knew exactly the topic I wanted to do. I have been translating songs since 9th grade. When I moved to Jakarta, I knew my English was not good enough, partly because English is my second language, and my English vocabulary is quite weak. Many teachers have advised me to read books or watch movies to improve, but books and movies are not my preference at all. So I came up with this "topic" and implemented it myself. Even the process takes a lot of time to complete but I always consider it as a hobby to improve my English vocab. I love to listen to music, every day, every free time I would listen to my favorite soundtrack while lip-syncing and dancing. Then I thought about the idea of translating Vietnamese to English, it would be educating as well as entertaining. During the 2021 summer, I usually spend my time translating my favorite Vietnamese song into English. There are many times I failed to post my translations to social media because I wasn’t ready to work with social media yet, I afraid I might make a mistake and the viewers might criticize me, but now thanks to Personal Project and a bit of benefit of a doubt, I am motivated to upgrade this little hobby of mine and ready jump out of my comfort zone! My learning goal is to learn and improve my English and video editing skills. From my past experiences, translating lyrics has helped me learn many esoteric English words. Recently, I have tried to edit basic videos for my parents. Developing this skill will increase my video aesthetics and qualities.

Reflection

Like I said, translating songs is a little hobby I do to pass the time, but since then I've never really gotten into the stories behind the lyrics. After completing this song, I myself have learned more about the meanings of the art inside the songs. Like how they mix folk and modern music, and how singers express their individuality through music. From this project I gave myself some lessons from the experience I have after my products have been completed.

About my product overall, the first thing that comes to mind is happiness but not completeness. There have been many times in the process of working on my project, like every time I finished a video, I thought everything was fine, until the next day when I re-watch my video, I felt like it was not perfect enough, therefore, I started to edit it again. Except that I always spot out imperfections every single time I re-watch my video, the reasons are sometimes because I find a better word to translate, sometimes I have to re-order the texts because they weren't matched with the beat or the font could be better, or sometimes I wanted to change the font. I have had these problems continue until the day I had to submit my product and until I felt like my videos were generally good enough.

One thing that made me regret is not investing in video editing knowledge and skill enough. Cap Cut, the app I use for editing my video, is equipped with modern video editing modes, but instead of learning and creating highlights for my videos, I have kept with the traditional "one wallpaper, one font throughout the video" format. The reason I have this burden on my mind is when I saw the Music Video Lyrics of Rap Viet, a rap competition in Vietnam, their editing style is very bright and the format of each video matches the rap song and the rapper personality. Although this editing style is very sophisticated and requires digital art skills, plus I have no passion for the digital field, however, it is the "individuality" of these colorful lyrics MVs that has helped me realize that I was too "safe" in my project and I need to step out my comfort zone more in the future.

Product Evaluation

I created a Youtube channel called T.A, basically an acronym of my name, Thuy Anh. I designed the logo of my channel starting from T.A and after that, I added a symbol of a music note in the middle of the A. I made this logo quite randomly and simply, but I feel nothing to worry about it. Up to this time, I have a total of 4 Vietnamese song translation videos. My 4 videos are:

• Gió Đánh Đò Đưa - Hong Duyen x Ta Quang Dung
  

• Ngọc Hoa Tự Khúc - Quach Mai Thi
  

• I Am Diva - Thu Minh
  

• Hương - Van Mai Huong
  

At first, I planned to translate 5 songs, and my list included 4 Vietnamese songs and 1 English song. Unfortunately, I spent a lot of time on school and personal activities, plus I had to edit and re-edit the video many times, so I didn't have enough time to do all 5 as expected.

At first, I wanted the image to fill the whole screen and the text would stay on top of it. However, when making the first video, Gio Danh Do Dua, I didn't know how to make the image fit into the screen. I noticed that the upper and lower corners of the photo still had two gaps, so I took advantage of that to make text inserts.