Who is responsible for movie titles in foreign countries?
I have always wondered who is responsible for movie titles in foreign countries. Specifically, for movies made in the USA and distributed internationally.
Sometimes they only change a little, sometimes I have the impression I am watching a whole new movie. They have nothing to do with the original. Sometimes it is English as well but a completely different title.
Why do we need them at all?
Some examples for Germany:
Original Title (USA) │ German Title (and my personal translation
│ word-by-word back to english)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╈━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
"Made in Dagenham" │ "We Want Sex" (no kidding!)
│
"Finding Neverland" │ "Wenn Träume fliegen lernen" ("When dreams learn to fly")
│
"North by Northwest" │ "Der unsichtbare Dritte" ("The invisible third")
│
"Cradle 2 the grave" | "Born 2 Die"
│
"Monty Python and the holy grail"| "Die Ritter der Kokosnuss" ("the knights of the coconut")
I could continue a long time but I think these few examples give an expression what I am talking about. This is a homepage with lots of other examples for all german-speakers out there.
Similiar question: Why do many movie titles differ between the us and uk
Best Answer
The movie's producers are responsible for each title. There are several considerations:
- How well they believe a title will attract an audience
- Whether the title resembles any title ever used before in that region
- How well the title matches the movie's content based on cultural traditions in that market
The title is one of the most important aspects of marketing. The big studios have offices—mostly for marketing—in major centers around the world. Some people in each office are responsible to assist selecting a title with proper considerations.
Pictures about "Who is responsible for movie titles in foreign countries?"
Why do movie titles change in different countries?
Movie titles can change from country to country for many reasons, such as specific cultural references that go over people's heads or marketing ploys to get the attention of a larger audience.Why do Korean movies have English titles?
Also, Koreans are not very familiar with Romanization, making it much harder to spell. That is why Romanization is causing even more inconvenience to Koreans. For these reasons, many, perhaps, most Korean users want the titles of Korean movies to be written in English titles.What movies are called in other countries?
Here are 15 movie title that were changed in other English-speaking markets.- "13 Going on 30" (2004) became "Suddenly 30" in Australia. ...
- "Airplane!" (1980) became "Flying High?" in Australia and New Zealand. ...
- "Fever Pitch" (2005) was transformed into "The Perfect Catch" in the UK.
Why is it called Suddenly 30 in Australia?
In Australia, the title was changed to "Suddenly 30", because distributors thought audiences would misunderstand the original title.More answers regarding who is responsible for movie titles in foreign countries?
Answer 2
In Poland, my home country, that problem exists too.
There are lots of bad translations, the best known example is The Sting which was translated literally to "??d?o", as it is the organ of some insects. The English meaning for "trick" was lost, making no sense in the Polish title.
The other example (closer to your question) is Die hard, translated to "Szklana pu?apka", which means "Trap of glass". This could make sense for the first movie of the series, but gets no in others.
In case of old movies (before 1989) this could have been translator's idea, as no copyrights were there in Poland. But now this still sometimes is strange, eg. "Music and Lyrics" translated to "Prosto w serce" which could be somehow (very loosely) related to "pop! goes my heart", but it directly means "directly to the heart" and this connection is not clear.
I don't know how it is in Germany, but might be that marketers said that changing title will attract more audience. I remember the "Dirty Dancing" as it was translated to "Wiruj?cy seks" (Whirling sex), I was 14 or something like that, so I was very interested to watch this, and I know I am not the one who was much disappointed.
I think that the title should not only match the meaning, but sound also in similar way. If it is short, it should not be long in translation. If it is some idiom, another idiom should be used, etc. This might be issue.
Now, when "Dirty Dancing" is aired on tv, the title is not translated, which makes some sense, as this is hard to translate. It would require to use more words and the Polish title would not be so compact.
(PS. Greetings to everyone as this is my first post here)
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