Stop translating, start songwriting

The third phase, "Another Rotten Year", is a rock Christmas single about family, alcohol, cynicism and black humour, again in roughly 23 language and market versions. It produced the main method change of the whole experiment.

Until then, lyric work had leaned on syllable counts: if the English line has eight syllables, find a local line of about eight. That proved insufficient. A line can scan correctly and still sing badly — the natural word stress lands on the wrong note, short function words sit on melodically important notes, the singer has to stretch words, or the line sounds correct but not like anything a songwriter from that country would write.

The brief was rewritten: think as a native songwriter, not as a translator. The priority order flipped — first vocal cadence, then natural word stress, then idiom, hook, rhyme, assonance and cultural credibility, and only then whether each line still meant exactly what the English meant. The English version remained the musical master; melody, structure and phrase lengths were the frame. Inside that frame the lyric could move freely.

The Dutch version shows the shift in miniature. Early choruses were grammatical and close to the English but did not run. The final chorus reads:

Drink nog maar een flesje / En zing nog één keer mee / Op weer een klotejaar / Laat al je zorgen varen / Vanavond drinken we bier / Want kerstfeest is weer hier (Have one more little bottle / and sing along once more / to another lousy year / let all your worries go / tonight we're drinking beer / because Christmas is here again)

It is not an exact translation. "Flesje" is more natural than a literal "bottle"; "Op weer een klotejaar" turns the line into a toast. In the third verse, the English idea that other children got presents became "Al m'n vrienden kregen cadeaus / Maar mijn cadeau was chaos" ("All my friends got presents / but my present was chaos") — not literal, but the sound pairing carries the character's childhood and humour in one line.