I just know you're all on tenterhooks, but readers, it was all so mentally exhausting it's taken me until now to recover. So thank you so much for your patience.
Son of Translation Idol - no man's land sucht den Superübersetzer went rather well, if I do say so myself. The task this time was to put a song into English, which is no mean feat. But we had a good few submissions from Berlin-based translators and literature lovers, and from more far-flung climes too. Our poet was the delightful Jan Böttcher, who also regaled us with his own German versions of formerly English songs on the guitar.
As time-honoured tradition has it, Jan got to bestow the Poet's Prize on his own favourite, which was Tony Crawford's version. I don't think anyone spotted the hidden Paul Simon reference though. Sadly Tony couldn't be with us on the night and the live Hollywood link-type technology was down due to human error. So he'll have to collect his amazing prizes another time.
The democratic part of the event though is the balloting process to determine the winner of the Audience Award. There was some dissent among the rank and file over the first-past-the-post system, with calls for a more European voting modus. But in the end everyone just marked their favourites with a cross because the electoral committee (i.e. me) was in no mood for mental arithmetric.
Third place went to the inimitable John Manning, a veteran of the no man's land translation lab. Second came the young newcomer Lesley Dean, who was even accompanied live on the guitar by her friend Nina. And number one by a substantial majority, Translation Idol 2010 was...
Steph Morris (aka DJ Lang) for his free version liberally strewn with references to seventies soul tunes.
All the translations should be up on the no man's land website in the next few days, where you can also listen to the original tune.
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