I am transcribing a TV program that contains a song sung first in
English, then taught to the children in Swahili. I need the
translation for this brief bit:
In English the singer sings:
Ah, who has it?
Who has the token?
Who will recover it?
Or must repay it?
He then sings the Swahili, which I include here in my best phonetic English guess:
Jay Jay Koolay
Jay Koe-lay-see
Koe-lay-see-low-ga
Ah-ga Koo-low-ga
Oot Ah-hee-lay (or Oot ah-Lee-lay, a bit unclear on the tape)
Oot Oot Ah-hee-lay
(repeats, etc.)
If it's any help, the person singing the song was a native Swahili
speaker. A word-by-word translation using an online dictionary isn't
giving me anything close to the phonetics here--not that that's a big
surprise to me :)
I'm more concerned that the phonetics are close than that the
translation exactly matches the English. I may have, for instance,
misunderstood him when he sang .. "has the token" in English, as it
was a bit hard to understand. It doesn't make sense to me, but that's
what it sounded like. I need to caption the words as he sings them in
Swahili on the screen.
Thanks for any assistance! |