Our film editor takes a look at the tangled art of international film titles translated for the German screen.

Hot Fuzz: Zwei abgewichste Profis (2007, d. Edgar Wright). IMAGO / United Archives

Occasionally I search my press emails for an upcoming film, and I’m confused when it doesn’t show up. I search the director and actors’ names, find the poster with their faces. But it turns out the movie is called something else entirely.

This happened to me this month; while writing about the Luis Buñuel retrospective upcoming at filmkunst66. I was confused by the title The Strangling Angel – a Buñuel I had missed during film school? No, it was in fact just the German title for his masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (in the original Spanish, El Ángel Exterminador). The altered name gives off a totally different mood and feeling – more calculating than constraining.

The title of a film bears a lot of weight. Like an elevator pitch, it gives one a sudden burst of understanding, or it plays with you viscerally. Often the title is translated as literally as possible into new languages, but different countries have different film markets and audiences – what works in one area may not land in the same way elsewhere.

Sometimes distributors decide against the original title, renaming it or adding a long sentence that wouldn’t pass for the byline for the picture. In the comparatively verbose German tongue, the straight-up translation method doesn’t work as easily.

Source: https://www.the-berliner.com/

Full article: https://www.the-berliner.com/film/cinema-movies-translation-classic-titles/