Why were the songs not translated/dubbed into German?

Question

When watching Brave in German I noticed that the songs actually haven't been translated (and redubbed accordingly). Rather than that, they were just left in the original English while the rest of the film was dubbed into German.

While this is not necessarily an uncommon thing to do in musical films in general nowadays, it marks a stark departure from previous Disney practice, which always used to translate and redub the songs along with the rest of the film. This has not only been done in the past, for the more classically animated films, but also in recent times on quite similar things like Tangled or Frozen (which was released after Brave). Brave thus seems to quite stick out among the musical Disney films and I wonder why that is.

Is there any information why they chose not to translate/dub the songs in Brave along with the rest of the film in apparent contrast to Disney tradition? Does this even mark a move towards that practice for later films maybe?

Answer 1

The Wikipedia article about the Brave soundtrack says

Differently from songs from Disney musical movies, in movies where the songs are only used as a background, Disney Character Voices International does not require for them to be dubbed. So, in the Arabic, Cantonese, Croatian, Estonian, German, Icelandic, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Taiwanese Mandarin, Romanian, Serbian and Slovak dubs, the songs were left in English.

(highlights by me)

This suggests that Disney Character Voices International Inc - which is responsible for dubbing and translation - has a (more or less) strict ruleset

musical songs get translated

background songs stay in original language

However, despite the linked Wikipedia article, I could not find further resources for this rule set (yet).