"Hold on Tight"

Backdated, archival post

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This morning I listened to Time for my Collection Audit project, and I workt on my transcriptions a bit.  I ended up deciphering all of the French in "Hold on Tight."  Previously, I had just "toi à ton rêve."

The whole French verse is (I think):

Oh, accrochez-toi à ton rêve
Accrochez-toi à ton rêve
Quand tu vois ton bâteau partir
Quand tu sens ton cœur se briser
Accrochez-toi à ton rêve

Essentially, it's the same as the first verse:

Mm, hold on tight to your dream
Hey, hold on tight to your dream
When you see your ship go sailin'
When you feel your heart is breakin'
Hold on tight to your dream

Its being almost exactly the same (just in translation) helpt immensely in deciphering it.  Otherwise, I would have had just "accrochez-toi à ton rêve," "quand tu vois ton," and the second "quand tu."  But I recognized that what little French I had followed the same structure as the other verses.

As an amateur linguist (French is my third language, and I've studied it for eight years), I have a lot to say about this.  First, "accrochez-toi" has a subject-verb agreement error.  "Accrochez" is the imperative form for 2nd person plural, but "toi" is a 2nd person singular pronoun (as are "tu" and "ton").  It should be either the singular "accroche-toi" (which leaves the line a syllable too short) or the plural "accrochez-vous" (which would require changing ton to votre, making the line a syllable too long).

I can't think of any specific examples, but I think sung French is often intentionally mispronounced just for the sake of filling in the meter.

"Accrochez-toi à ton rêve" omits the "tight" that's in the English verse; it's just "Hold on to your dream."  (This also made me realize that it's a flat adverb: tight instead of tightly.)  If I understand my French-English dictionary correctly, serré is the word for tightly, but if you were to add that to "accroche-toi…" to get a closer translation of the English line, there'd be one syllable too many.

I'm not sure if "partir" or "briser" are the right forms either.  Both are infinitives in the French (so a literal translation would be "When you see your ship to sail / When you feel your heart itself to break"), but it's more complicated in the English.  "Sailin'" (actually, maybe the whole "go sailin'") is a participle (a verbal adjective modifying "ship").  I'm not as proficient at French participles as I probably should be, but I did some research and found that "-ant" is added to the infinitive stem to form a participle.  So I think it should be "Quand tu vois ton bâteau partant."

"Is breakin'" is a verb in the indirect statement "Your heart is breakin'" (it's the present progressive form).  In English, the word that, which indicates an indirect statement, is often omitted, like it is here.  It's condensed to "When you feel your heart is breakin'," rather than "When you feel that your heart is breakin'."  If I remember French class correctly, in French, that (que) is always required.  And since "is breakin'" is in the indicative mood, briser needs to be conjugated from the infinitive form, so it should be "Quand tu sens que ton cœur se bris."

I find it interesting that there's a reflexive pronoun in the French that isn't in the English.  The French is "Quand tu sens ton cœur se briser" ("When you feel your heart itself to break"), but the English is just "When you feel your heart is breakin'."