JOHAN FRANZON teaches translation, interpreting, Swedish, and Nordic studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland, besides publishing academic work on the subject of song translation. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on musical comedy translation in 2009, studying the Broadway musical My Fair Lady (1956) as translated into Scandinavian languages (1959–1960), focusing both on the fidelity, singability and theatricality of the translators’ work. Aspects of that study are discussed in Franzon’s article “Musical comedy translation: Fidelity and format in the Scandinavian My Fair Lady” (in: Song and Significance. Virtues and Vices of Vocal Translation (ed: Gorlée), 2005).

Working to explore song translation as a field of translation studies, he has described five basic choices in the translingual traffic of song (“Choices in Song Translation: Singability in Print, Subtitles and Sung Performance”, The Translator 14:2, 2008), six methods for target lyric writing in the international exchange of pop songs, from near-enough to all-new (“The liberal mores of pop song translation: Slicing the source text relation six ways”, in Song Translation: Lyrics in Contexts (eds. Franzon, Greenall, Kvam & Parianou) 2021), as well as a conceptualization of song translation as a layered combination of approximations and appropriations (“Approximations and appropriations. Making Space for Song Translation in Translation Studies”, in MikaEL 15 (eds. Hartama-Heinonen, Ivaska, Kivilehto & Koponen), 2022). Some of his work is available on ResearchGate. His latest publication is a co-editor of a special issue of the journal Studia Translatorica 15: Song Translation Studies, available online.
 

As a song translator, he translated a few musicals into Swedish (The Wizard of Oz, Cabaret) into Swedish, before his academic career in Finland. Lately, he has translated Finnish children’s songs into Swedish and is currently working on an opera that will be produced in both Finnish and Swedish in Helsinki in the fall of 2025.