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Re:Florian Schneider has died by jacquesm on Thursday May 07, 2020 @03:03AM (#23100475)
Very true in the case of Kraftwerk, what is interesting that they tried at all, probably simply to reach a larger audience commercially, German lyrics wouldn't go very far in the English speaking world. Even Nena translated 99 lufballons.

English is much more compact, so there is quite a bit of filler words to match the music.

Re:Florian Schneider has died by dvirsky on Thursday May 07, 2020 @03:39AM (#23100673)
Part of it might just be due to not being native to English. Even if you're fluent, translating lyrics is super hard. I've seen many examples of great songs written in my native language (Hebrew) that just sounded so shallow and lowbrow when translated to English to appeal to a wider market.