A Word from the Webmaster

Hi, my name is Alan Smith Robertson. I'm British, I've been living in Spain (Cáceres y Badajoz) since 1994 and at the moment I'm a headmaster and English teacher in the Official School of Languages (Escuela Oficial de Idiomas) in Montijo (Extremadura).

Before I start, I have to apologise; I know that I often don't do justice to a song with rushed translations. We're talking about poetry, double meanings, onomatopeya or references to cultural aspects of the hispanic world, and all that is lost when what is most important is getting across the meaning or the content.

The idea of organising a database of translations into English of songs in Spanish came after only a few months of great success with http://www.songtranslator.net, a site dedicated to translations of English song lyrics into Spanish. My original idea came to me after several years of English language teaching in which I noticed that many teachers had difficulties finding appropriate songs whose lyrics would allow them to revise certain specific grammatical and lexical aspects of their classes... For example, is there a song in English which covers the irregular form of the past simple tense? The passive? The future? Isn't there a song in English which revises certain semantic fields such as professions, the days of the week or colours? Well my objective became that of offering to English teachers the possibility of finding songs which fulfilled these and many more criteria for use in the English Language classroom.

Before long I noticed that a great majority of the people visiting my website we're simply music fans looking for the meaning of their favourite songs, and I soon started receiving requests to translate Spanish songs into English: hence http://english.songtranslator.net/ was born.

Knowing the lyrics of a song enrichens it, it allows you to enjoy a song at another level, and it allows you to appreciate it for something else apart from a great riff or a cool solo (or the singer's arse!) Maybe the lyrics of your favourite Spanish-language song will disappoint you, but don't you think it's better to understand what you're listening to?

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