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This article contains Japanese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of kanji and kana. |
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Soramimi (Japanese 空耳; lit. "empty ear") "mishearing; feigned deafness" or Soramimi kashi (空耳歌詞; with kashi 歌詞, lit. "song words") "misheard lyrics" is a Japanese term for homophonic translation of song lyrics, that is, interpreting lyrics in one language as similar-sounding lyrics in another language. A bilingual soramimi word play contrasts with a monolingual mondegreen or homophonic transformation.
An example would be the Moldovan band O-Zone's song Dragostea din tei or Maiyahi (マイヤヒー, named from the words in the opening of the song). The refrain of the original song is:
The soramimi version:
Japanese comedian Tamori has had a long-running "Soramimi Hour" segment on his TV program Tamori Club, where he and his co-host watch mini-skits based on soramimi kashi submitted by the audience. The following are examples from "Soramimi Hour": the real lyric, followed by the soramimi text in Japanese, followed by the Japanese text romanized, followed (in parentheses) by the English translation.
From Metallica's "Enter Sandman":
From Sean Paul's "Fire Links Intro":
From Wu-Tang Clan's "Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber":
From Michael Jackson's "Ghosts":
From Jim Croce's "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown":
From The Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand":
From Emerson, Lake & Palmer's "Benny the Bouncer":
From Scorpions' "You Give Me All I Need":
From Filippa Giordano's "Casta Diva":
From the Gipsy Kings' "Bem, Bem, María":
From Mudhoney's "Here Comes Sickness":
From the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Suck My Kiss":
Mike Sutton, a mondegreen director on YouTube with the username "Buffalax", has uploaded several non-English music videos edited to include subtitles of the written English approximation of the video's original language's sound. These include Internet memes such as:
The latter, involving the video for Prabhu Deva Sundaram's song, "Kalluri Vaanil" from the Indian Tamil movie, Pennin Manathai Thottu, has occasionally been referred to as "the web's hottest clip" [1] On the Internet, both the terms "Buffalaxed" and "Benny lava" are now synonymous with mondegreens, "words or phrases misheard in ways that yield new meanings."[2][3]
The Palestinian patriotic song "Blādi, blādi" (بلادي بلادي "Motherland, Motherland") was intentionally "misheard" into Russian (as blyadi, blyadi = "whores, whores") and uploaded to YouTube with Russian subtitles. The resulting video became an instant hit on Russian-language websites and blogs with more than 2 million views, and a number of phrases from the Russian version (especially "No money, long bumblebee") became instant catchphrases. Below is the example of the chorus:
| Arabic (transliterated) | Russian | Russian (transliterated) | Russian translated |
|---|---|---|---|
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("blādi" in the original is dialect for standard Arabic bilādī بِلَادِي = "my country".)
In Mandarin Chinese, there is a joke based on Michael Jackson's "Beat It" which goes:
In Israel, soramimi flash clips of the songs Ameno known as 'Dori Met' (דורי מת, Dori is dead) is very popular. The clips includes the misheard nonsensical lyrics (the first song is heard as 'Dori is dead, if you shoot him, Nadav Adler, amen to him...', the second as 'Maya she, Maya he, Maya ha, Maya haha! [...] Felix in a bill, sleep, sleep, hey!') and matching visual representations: in the first song, a boy named Dori is killed; on the second, pictures of Maya Buskila are shown with beards or with clown make-up, etc.
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