One of the appeals of working on Christmas Around the World was the opportunity to sing in multiple languages. Including English there are ten languages that appear on the album, adding a different level of complexity to preparations for these songs.
I was able to draw on some experience for a few of the languages, with French, Italian, German, and Latin being most familiar to me from pieces I have studied or sung in the past. And while I’ve sung a few songs in Spanish, for some reason I have always found that a bit of a struggle. Surprisingly, Japanese (written in Romaji) actually isn’t that bad, as it is very phonetic when written as Latin characters.
But Croatian? Greek? Dutch? I knew I was going to need some help.
To the Rescue
And that’s where tools like Google Translate came to the rescue. Type in a word or phrase and hear it spoken back almost immediately. YouTube was also a help here, as there are video clips of native speakers pronouncing words and phrases as a learning tool. With these as a reference it then became an exercise in listening to learn the pronunciations correctly, finding my own phonetic code to help remember the sounds, and then a lot of repetition so I was able to speak them naturally (I hope).
In the end, I tried to do each of these languages justice, as I wanted to honor the global nature of these songs. For those with more familiarity than I my apologies up front for mispronunciations or errors.
And so –
- Joyeux Noël (French)
- Feliz Natal (Portuguese)
- Gelukkig Kerstfeest (Dutch)
- Feliz Navidad (Spanish)
- Sretan Božić (Croatian)
- Fröhliche Weihnachten (German)
- Kalá Christoúgenna (Greek)
- Yoi Kurisumasu (Japanese)
- Felicem Natalem (Latin)
- and Merry Christmas to you!
Don’t forget to Subscribe to receive updates as Christmas Around the World moves closer to release. And get ready to Stamp Your Passport November 6th to be the first to stream my new album on your favorite platform.
