Lost In Translation: The Funniest Foreign Titles Of American Films

While "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" ruled at our box office "Cloudy with a Chance of Falafel" reigned in Israel. This got us thinking: What movie titles didn't have such artful equivalents?

If You Leave Me, I Delete You (Italy)

Source: Den Of Geek

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Comments

[David Christensen]

10:41 AM on 10/01/2009

There was a movie starring Jet Li called Unleashed but here in Japan it's called Danny the Dog.

[Cryostatic]

08:58 AM on 10/01/2009

Captain Supermarket.

Epic.

[alisonv]

08:18 AM on 10/01/2009

But you forgot the best of the worst Italian translations. The Sound of Music became, "All Together Passionately." When someone asked me about it, I didn't even know what film they were talking about. Sounded a bit k in k.y

[Tenley]

07:19 AM on 10/01/2009

Well, obviously the "translation" shown for Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind" isn't a translation of the title but a complete renaming of the film based on what happens in it (i.e. "If You Leave Me, I Delete You"). Neither are good titles (and I understand why they gave up trying to translate, literally, Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind when it never made much sense in English. Heck, for that matter, to this day I can never remember correctly what the heck the thing is called.) But the story and headline here are misleading from photo/example one and somehow ... I don't know. It's a letdown and it shouldn't be but this happens all the time on this site. It's a lot like a movie that promises too much and thinks it's audience is too stupid to figure out it didn't deliver in even the most basic way .

[amake]

06:03 AM on 10/01/2009

I don't believe this "Boogie Nights" Chinese title. Everything I can find on the internet says that Boogie Nights was called 不羁夜 in China, where the first two characters are a meaningless transliteration of "boogie" (bùjī in pinyin) and the third means "night." So basically a back-translation would be identical: "Boogie Nights".

[Promise]

01:31 AM on 10/01/2009

These are hilarious! "Captain Supermarket?"--It makes me wonder that film was really about....some guy who robs a supermarket? Or owns a supermarket, lives in a Supermarket? ....Makes you think.

Slight correction to an eariler comment--I think every Woody Allen film should be credited to (not titled)Urban Neurotic.

[jamalc]

08:44 AM on 10/01/2009

well to be fair... At the end of Army of Darkness, Ash does whoop a little tail in a supermarket!

[Helanren]

10:11 PM on 09/30/2009

This whole let's-laugh-at all-those-silly-foreigners thing is pretty funny, seeing how it's coming from a country where 99% of the population wouldn't be able to translate a single word from any language different from the one they grew up with.....

Oh, and The Full -Monty is an *American* movie now???

[jdlund]

10:48 PM on 09/30/2009

Good god you take yourself too seriously. There are plenty of foreign films that are translated here that end up with silly or absurd titles. It's just English speakers wouldn't see why those are funny. I speak six languages, I'm originally from Norway, and I still think some of these are really funny. Not as funny as your average American tourist attempting to speak French, but funny none the less. Either way, get over yourself. Not everything has to be an "issue." You don't have to be so hyper-sensitive; just laugh, it's funny.

[HensonFan]

03:30 AM on 10/01/2009

Stole the reply right off my keyboard. Just for that I am forced to fan you.

[jdlund]

10:55 PM on 09/30/2009

Oh and I will add that it is really ignorant of you to say that 99% of the population here can't speak any other language than what they grew up with when a substantial portion of the population here came from another country. Just like I did. You're just a self-hating American, which, by the way, is as annoying as the over-the-top "our country is the greatest country" people.

[beihai]

06:46 PM on 09/30/2009

Let us not forget, the Chevy Nova in Spanish means the Chevy no go (talk about truth in advertising)

[evrenseven]

06:30 PM on 09/30/2009

In Turkey, Brokeback Mountain was translated as "Ibne Kovboylar:" Queer Cowboys.

http://img80.imageshack.us/i/resim11df7.jpg/#q=ibne%20kovboylar

[LMPE]

06:00 PM on 09/30/2009

"The Waterboy": Dimwit Surges Forth (Thailand)

"Nixon": Big Liar (China)

"The In-Laws" (1979): Don't Shoot the Dentist (France)

I remember while I was in Moscow earlier this year, "Knocked Up" was on TV one night. Russia also calls it "Slightly Pregnant".

[goddess1871]

05:54 PM on 09/30/2009

Always amusing. I think somewhere I read that Dave Barry pointed out that "Coca-Cola" translates into "Bite the wax tadpole" in Chinese.

[beihai]

06:40 PM on 09/30/2009

no it doesn't. Coca-Cola is spelled in Chinese and pronounced back in English as Ke Kou Ke Le, which just means that coke will make your mouth happy, which I actually find funnier.

[Anna Toledo]

05:26 PM on 09/30/2009

in brazil every comedy has "noise" or "confusion" in its title.

[Anna Toledo]

05:23 PM on 09/30/2009

this cannot be true... lol

[desto]

03:16 PM on 09/30/2009

The titles of knocked up and grease are the same in all of latin america, not just peru and argentina

[Topanga2009]

06:44 PM on 09/30/2009

Yeah. I'm from Chile and I remember being told about the problem with using 'Grease' as a title when I first watch the movie as a kid. In some Latin American countries, the direct translation for 'Grease' is 'Grasa,' which really kind of means "lard." The word itself has negative connotations, so they changed up the name to Vaselina so as to not be so shocking. Weirdness!

[MJinCanada]

01:52 AM on 10/01/2009

Well, the title refers to the greasy hair creams that the guys used in the decade portrayed. I remember my brothers using those -- and they were basically scented vaseline, so the Spanish/Portuguese title works very well.

[LaCaminante]

03:05 PM on 09/30/2009

Some of these might be "lost in translation" back to english... The Knocked Up one which HuffPost says is "A little bit pregnant" in peru is actually a play on the word "lio" that means "to get in a mess" and often has a sexual connotation. So, really it is the literal english translation of the title that misses the point.