The two titles I’m currently thinking of are manga/anime series. Their official English names are Dance in the Vampire Bund and Witch Hat Atelier. Both “bund” and “atelier” are words that are used in the English language, but I had never to my recollection encountered them “in the wild” before or since and I would guess that the words are obscure to the majority of English speakers.
Any other examples of English translations that use less-than-household words? (Examples outside of manga/anime are not only allowed but encouraged.)
There’s also the classic Hong Kong TV series “The Bund” that takes place in Shanghai (which has a district called “The Bund”). Not to mention the various remakes of the original.
The multiplayer game Warthunder occasionally uses the word ‘gramercy’ as a synonym for thanks when using its autotext messaging system. Warthunder is made by Russian developers and they chose ‘gramercy’ as an old-timy sounding word when translating to English.
“Bund” of course is a German word meaning roughly “club” or “association”.
Its last famous use in the USA was the German American Bund - Wikipedia which was a group of US ethnic German Nazi sympathizers from ~1933 until late 1941 when world events abruptly intervened.
So I expect the OP’s Dance in the Vampire Bund is probably a poetical reference to hanging out in the vampire’s club or clubhouse or in the company of vampires, or somesuch.
Yes, but it also takes place on a small island, so the embankment near water definition isn’t implausible either. Possibly a deliberate double meaning?
I don’t really think either of those words are that obscure. Anyone who watches shows like Project Runway or anything about fashion has heard atelier. I know bund as in the American Bund during WWII, ie American Nazis.
It’s a bit odd to call those English translations because those seem to be the actual English loan words that are used in the Japanese titles (“bando” and “atorie”). So it’s more a matter of the Japanese title using obscure loan words in the first place rather than an unusual translation of a more common word.
Our local symphony, for which i sing in the chorus, is doing a version of Peer Gynt, originally by Ibsen with incidental music by Edvard Grieg. The singing is largely in Norwegian, but the dialogue is in English.
At one point a troll says to Peer Gynt “Infirtilate her?” (with outrage, so it’s apparently a bad thing).
As far as i can find, there is no such word. Does that count as obscure?
When I can find the time (and dedication) I read French newspapers online for vocabulary (which works well because you can insta-translate words you don’t know), and this sort of thing has happened to me a couple of times. One was the French word “autochtone”, which insta-translated into English as “autochthonous”. Helpful.
Bund meaning a dam is “of course” not a German word at all. It comes from Hindi, a loanword from Persian band meaning ‘closure’ which is “of course” an Indo-European cognate of band, bind, bond, bound, and Bund.
My nominee for worst translation into English of all time is the 16th-century atrocity “begging the question,” a crap translation from Latin petitio principii, itself a crap translation from the original Greek τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ αἰτεῖσθαι (tò en archêi aiteîsthai ‘asking the original point’). The verb αἰτέω ‘ask’ can also mean ‘postulate, assume’. English ask and Latin petitio do not have that extended meaning, so that a literal translation from Greek makes gibberish in Latin and English. So nowadays 9 out of 10 English speakers haven’t the least clue what “begging the question” really means.
Bund as a German word meaning roughly “association” is most certainly a German word. One since imported to English with that same meaning: an association.
Bund as you say is also a type of dam, and that word has the etymology you cite.
The OP seemed to me to have glommed onto the dam version from a position of google-driven ignorance and was unaware of the alternate meaning that IMO fit the rest of the source sentence better. So I pointed out the other unrelated meaning. Perhaps my “of course” was an overstatement and a sign of my ignorance about the “dam” meaning.
Except it doesn’t. The Bund in Vampire Bund is a district built on an artificial island where a minority population lives, the comparison to the real-life Chinese Bunds where foreigners live is very fitting.
A bund is also a dyke used to isolate toxic waste liquids - that’s also (unintentionally, probably) appropriate.
Arguably the “poster child” for weird translations into English is Sir Richard Burton’s unexpurgated translation of the Thousand and One Nights.
Although he billed it as a “plain and literal translation”, critics from his day to the present have argued that it is anything but.
From the Wikipedia article on it:
I don’t agree. I think Burton’s translation has a style and charm about it that makes it a great read. But I can see how some people would like to have a translation of the translation.
I have a set of the three volume edition that I bought at a flea market (I’m sure for under $10) in the early 1990s. I started reading it but didn’t go more than a couple of hundred pages, not because I had anything against it but because there were other things to do with my time, I sat it aside for later, and suddenly 30 years passed.