How books and movies get their foreign-language titles

How book and movie titles are translated

I’m reading a great book right now. It’s called A Bad Name. Actually, wait. It’s called The Story of a New Name. Hang on, that’s not right. You might know it as, The Story of a New Last Name.

Whatever you call it, it’s the second book in a series by Elena Ferrante. The Italian title—the original—can be translated directly as, “The Story of a New Last Name.” That’s about the same as the titles in French, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian. Of all the languages I looked at, only one translated it differently—Spanish, which is the version I’m reading. The Spanish title translates to, A Bad Name.

And the irony is, of all those languages, Spanish is most similar to Italian. That doesn’t seem to make sense—the closest language is the one with the most different title translation.

Movie and book titles can be confusing, as anyone who speaks a second language can tell you. And once in a while, you’ll see a case—like my Elena Ferrante book—that’s really confusing.

What’s going on here? To make sense of it all, we need to look at how the business works. Let’s start with books. The original publisher of a book sells the rights to foreign-language publishers. Sometimes those are subsidiaries of the original publisher. Other times, they’re entirely different companies. But it’s those local companies that hire a translator for the text, design the cover art, decide on a title, and implement plans for production, marketing and distribution.

So when a book lands in a new language, a new company takes over the whole production—including the title. That means there’s no central figure making sure that a book’s title is consistent across all the world’s languages. And in fact, the process is called “localization” because it’s about so much more than just translation.

And that makes sense. Because while publishing is a great vehicle for distributing the art of literature, it is, above all, a business. And the local publishers use their creative and business expertise to pick the title that will sell the best in their local markets.

In the case of my book, the Spanish publisher, Lumen, decided to take a little more creative license with the title than, say, the Russian or Japanese publishers did. And they had every right to do that because they own the rights to the Spanish version of the book.

Movies work the same way. When a movie is released in a new country, and in a new language, the movie goes to a local distributor. The local distributor is the one who gets the movie into the theaters, creates the trailers, does subtitling and dubbing, and produces the posters and other marketing collateral.

So we know that with both books and movies, local companies are in charge of the titles in foreign languages. But how do they decide on a title? This is a big decision, and there are a few potential strategies.

The first is almost not a strategy at all, which is to just keep the English title. Titanic is a great example. It’s one word, it’s a proper noun, and it’s widely understood in other languages. Avatar, Skyfall, and Oppenheimer are all movie titles that were not translated at all.

But if you are going to translate, the safest option is to translate the title as literally as possible. Take the first book in the Elena Ferrante series. My Brilliant Friend is the English title, and it hews closely to the Italian. Every other language I looked at came very close to a direct translation. This is a good option for titles with simple words and universal concepts.

The Lion King, The Godfather, and Pirates of the Caribbean got literal, direct translations in multiple languages.

As in many parts of life, though, the safest option is not always the best. A lot of thought goes into the original title. How it sounds; how many words are required; how long those words are; how they look on a poster; if there’s rhyming, alliteration, or wordplay. Plus, many movie titles include a cultural understanding that would be lost in a direct translation.

Home Alone is a great example. In English, it’s two words of about the same length, and they blend together very easily: Home Alone. And in the English-speaking world, “home alone” is commonly understood to mean a child left at home without parents or any type of guardian. So the title is quick, snappy, and powerful. In just two short words, it captures the excitement and a little bit of danger that kids feel when their parents are away.

But in other languages, a direct translation of “home alone” sounds more like, “at home, by yourself.” I don’t know about you, but I’m not running to the theater to see that movie.

So the local distributors don’t just think about, “What would the original title be in our language?” They have to think about, “What would make people in our country pay to see this movie?” That’s why in France, the Home Alone title became something like, Mom—I missed the flight! and in China it was Little Devil Takes Charge at Home.

Interestingly, some “translations” of English movie titles are just different English words. This is common in France. The Hangover was released in France as, Very Bad Trip, just like that, in English. Pitch Perfect, which includes a play on words in English, was released in France with an alternate English title, The Hit Girls. So what would it take to get French viewers to the cinemas to see those movies? Just different English-language titles, I guess.

The final approach is the most difficult. This is to try to match the poetry of the title, but in a different way. And this is the most daring way to title a movie in another language. But it can really pay off when done well.

Here’s an example. In English, a common formulation for a story title is, “X and the Y.” Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. James and the Giant Peach. Sex and the City. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. This is a common pattern, especially for children’s stories, but it’s not that way in every language.

The Danish title of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory translates to, The Boy Who Drowned in the Chocolate Sauce. That doesn’t sound great in English. But—and I won’t try to pronounce it—in Danish, three words start with “d” and two of them start with “dr”, giving the title a rhythmic, almost musical sound. So they replace the, “X and the Y” pattern common in English with a title that includes alliteration in Danish—a different kind of artistry.

This more poetic approach is common when translating movies into languages with different alphabets. Chinese has many, many more characters than the Latin alphabet we use in English. You can fit a lot more information into less space. And in Chinese, a four-character title is considered elegant, balanced, and symmetrical. A lot of Chinese idioms are just four characters long.

So finding a good title that’s also four characters is like the holy grail of translating movie names in Chinese. One of the most-often-cited translations is of the movie, The Bridges of Madison County. In Chinese, the translation is like, The Lost Dream by the Covered Bridge. Not bad at all—but even better because they made it four characters.

Jeff’s take

Special thanks to ChatGPT for the assist on this one. There’s no way I would have been able to get the English equivalents from all these movies without ChatGPT. And I did spot check them from other sources, just to be safe.

Also—if you are a book lover, I highly recommend these books I mentioned at the beginning of the story. They’re called the Neapolitan Novels, in English—four books in total, starting with My Brilliant Friend. They are by the Italian writer Elena Ferrante, a pseudonym, by the way. And I love them. I’m in the middle of the second book now, in Spanish, and I can’t put it down—and big thanks to JR who turned me onto them. JR is the producer of Plain English. If you’re not a book lover, no worries. There’s a four-part series that you can binge on Max.