World Translation Center Music Blog

May 29, 2015

This year’s Eurovision Song Contest 2015 was the 60th edition of the annual event. The winner of last year’s contest was Austrian Conchita Wurst, which made Austria the host for this year’s contest. The event took place in Vienna.

Even though this is a European contest, this year Australia also participated for the first time. In total, there were 40 countries competing with Sweden winning the first place, Latvia came in second and Russia earned the third place.

In order to be able to compete, every country organizes its own competition and only that finalist will be able to represent their country in the Eurovision Song Contest. This year, the Finnish entry was a 4-men group called PKN. PKN stands for ‘Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät’, which translates into English ‘Pertti Kurikka’s Name Day’. Pertti Kurikan is the guitarist of the band. At this year’s Eurovision, the PKN group performed a punk rock song which is the shortest song, at 1:25 minutes, in the history of the Eurovision Song Contest. Listen to this song in the featured video, above.

These four men came together at a cultural workshop for the learning disabled. Three of the men have Down Syndrome and the forth is autistic. They play fierce punk rock. In 2012, a documentary was released about this group called ‘The Punk Syndrome’ which has won several awards both in Finland and abroad. The film shows these disabled men as a group playing punk music and using their music as an outlet to their daily frustrations with things they encounter, like living in a group home, not being served coffee and so on because of their disability. This film opened a window into the world of the disabled. Because of this upbeat film the band rose from being completely unknown to becoming a small phenomenon. Here is a trailer to the video with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM58kP_JHkQ

This style of film is ideal for adding subtitles when releasing it to other countries. The film does not have a narrator to be dubbed into any other language, it only shows individual people talking, and there is quite a bit of music and singing. Because it is hardly possible to dub songs, the entire film benefits from subtitles as they preserve the tone of each speaker and singer.  World Translation Center can translate subtitles in all formats and also lay the subtitles to your videos and create a new master.