I saw an interesting article recently on Russian translations of Hollywood blockbuster titles, along wih critiques on how the author thought each effort fared. It made me think about how difficult some titles must be to translate, and about the tactics translators can use to get around any potential problems.

As the author of the article rightly pointed out, some titles will be easy to translate, such as the straightforward “127 Hours” or “The Fighter”.

Those that rely more on word play and connotations, however, will prove more of a challenge. However, an experienced translator will know how to deal with a more suggestive title. Take “True Grit”, for instance, which is quite hard to define for even a native speaker. One website offers quite a nice suggestion: “strength of mind and the courage to see through one’s convictions even in the face of strong adversity”. However some countries don’t even seem to have tried to capture this sense of the title, such as Spain, who translated it as “Valor del Ley”.

When hunting for examples of movie translation, I came across this little gem: in a hilarious twist, the movie “Lost in Translation” was translated as “Lost in Tokyo” in many countries.

Veritas can provide professional film and television subtitling services of the highest quality. If you need dubbing, we can even provide professional actors who are native speakers of the target language. We believe in getting things right, even for the smallest text, and we will make sure people are talking about your movie for all the right reasons.

Have you seen any particularly good or bad movie title translations lately? How creative do you think it’s acceptable to be?