In Germany:
Die Hard -> Die slowly
Girl, Interrupted -> Freaked out
Miss Congeniality -> Miss Undercover
The Fugitive -> While fleeing
When I was younger I had a collection of bad translations but now I can only think of those few… well maybe I’ll remember more later.
BTW: Alien was kept here in Germany and lately they decided to keep most original titles.
Ah, I remembered some more:
Airplane -> The unbelievable journey in a crazy airplane
Hot Shots -> Hot Shots - The Mother of all Movies
Thin red Line -> The sharp Edge
Saving Private Ryan -> Soldier James Ryan
Some Finnish ones:
Unfaithful - The Fateful Affair
Ocean’s Eleven - The High Stakes
Me, Myself & Irene - The two of us & Irene
Mimic - The Infinite Danger
U-Turn - U-Turn to Hell
Shallow Hal - Hal and the BIG Love
Big Momma’s House - The Cop in drag
Best Laid Plans - Infernal Plan
Never Been Kissed - Have to Be In
Hearts in Atlantis - Heart of the Beast
Domestic Disturbance - The Athmospere of Fear
Meet the Parents - Family Is a Nightmare
Desperate Measures - Tormenting Moments
Pitch Black - Threat of Darkness
The Out-Of-Towners - Crazy from New York
Some movies like Ocean’s Eleven have two part titles. First comes the English one and then the Finnish one -> Ocean’s Eleven - Korkeat Panokset. More common is to give only the original title or the translated one.
This whole thing reminds me of an SNL sketch from about 1990. Mike Myers was a Japanese TV exec narrating a sitcom. “She is asking him why the hamburgers smell like a car that has crashed. He tries to think of a falsehood—but he cannot! So he throws fudge at her! If you like The Nude House of Wacky People, you will also like our other shows: You Can’t Stop Him, He’s Too Insane!; Good Hitting Police, and Who Can Figure Out Such Devices?”
Don’t sweat; it wouldn’t make any more sense if you could see the visuals.
Forrest J. Ackerman’s magazine Famous Monster of Filmland used to run articles on this back in the 60s. In fact they turned it into a game – See if you can guess the original Movie Title from the name of the Translation. Sometimes you have to wonder about the translations. “Dr. Frankenstein” shows up surprisingly often in the titles of movies that have nothing to do with Frankenstein, apparently just signal that it’s a horror flick.
A few more from Mexico:
Far and Away - A Distant Horizon
Disclosure - Sexual Harassment
Wall Street - Power and Greed
Top Gun - Passion and Glory
The Wraith - Turbocop
Flawless - Nobody’s Perfect
Minority Report - Prior Sentence
Bull Durham - The Durham Bulls
The Man With Two Brains - The Erotic Doctor
Billy Madison - Dumb But Not That Dumb
Galaxy Quest - Heroes Out of Orbit
My Girl - My First Kiss
Breakfast Club - Club of Five
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Trapped with No Way Out
Above the Law - Nico
The Blues Brothers - Hard-Face Brothers
Bedazzled - To the Devil with the Devil
In Norway, the Austin Powers subtitles have been translated as the following
“International Man of mystery” becomes “The spy who came out of the freezer”
and “The Spy who Shagged me” becomes literally “The Spy who Spermed Me”, though “Spermed” is idiomatic for “impregnated”.
I was in Paris when the film “Analyze This!” came to theatres. (It was that one where Robert DeNiro is a mob boss who goes to the Psychiatrist played by Billy Crystal. Hilarity ensues (or so the producers hope).
I can’t recall for certain whether it even had a French title, but I do remeber that there was an english title on the poster. The English title being “Mafia Blues”.
I assume that this was because the original title relied to much on idiom.
What? You have not finished your homework? Then you must fight the bear!
English language movies released in Norway often keep the original title; I notice that our local cinema is currently listing (among other titles) Men in Black II, A Beautiful Mind, Murder by Numbers, and Panic Room, for instance. But there have certainly been some memorable non-literal translations.Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, for instance, became Austin Powers: The Spy Who Spermed Me. The title was roundly criticized, both because “spermed” is no more of a word in Norwegian than it is in English, and because the spy in question was female…
Airplane! became Help, We’re Flying! and National Lampoon’s Vacation was translated as Help, We’re On Vacation!. So lots of absurd comedies now get names that start with “Help, We’re…”
When the distributors had to come up with a title for Miss Congeniality, they knew that the average Norwegian was familiar with beauty contests and “Miss X” titles, but not the word “congeniality”. So they gave it a new title but in English: Miss Undercover.
And one of my favorites: Dead Poets’ Society became The Day Is Yours.
There’s an old movie called “Bringing up Baby” (“Baby” being the pet leopard in the movie.)
The German title is “Leoparden küsst man nicht”, roughly “You shouldn’t kiss leopards”.
scratches head
I’ve noticed that title translations from German to English often make little sense. Our local art museum was having a German film festival and they translated *Vormittagsspuke (= Late Morning Ghosts *) as Ghosts Before Breakfast. I can understand the need to make some changes in translation, but that one makes absolutely no sense.
One that is slightly more reasonable is The Hobbit, which was titled in German The Little Hobbit. Because Hobbit is a very English word, even if Tolkien might have invented it, maybe the German publisher thought that the insertion of the adjective would make the title sound better. Unfortunately, though, it does give the title a more juvenile spin than it otherwise would have.