Excessive translation

I've written at least one, and more like a half dozen, posts over the years in which I touch on the issue of which foreign film titles get translated to English and which don't. Other bloggers will know that although you never write the exact same post twice, you tend to return to familiar concerns, and sometimes forget you've written about them before. 

Y Tu Mama Tambien has been my go-to example of a film title you would never translate because the English version of it, And Your Mother Too!, is just so much less elegant looking and so much more silly sounding than the Spanish original.

Well, so much for that.

I happened upon the page for this movie on IMDB today, and, well, you can see the results for yourself above.

I'm quite sure this would have changed on IMDB only recently. I suspect it would have something to do with displaying all titles in the language in which you are viewing the page, and an inability to set exceptions for particular film titles. (Inability/unwillingness -- data maintenance on IMDB is certainly tedious enough as it is.)

But there do continue to be exceptions. Just as one example from the same language, I went to the page for El Mariachi and it does not read The Mariachi. (To quote Chris Farley on SNL, "For those who don't habla Espanol, El Nino is Spanish for ... The Nino.")

I also thought to check L'Avventura to see if they had changed it to the far more pedestrian The Adventure, and thank goodness, no they had not. Pierrot le Fou is not Crazy Pete, though I have actually seen it listed that way on one streaming service, if you can believe it. 

So maybe the logic is, once you approach a sentence in length, it's just too ungainly for someone who doesn't speak the language, even when most of the words in that title are pretty easy to say.

Anyway, I don't like it. But I am reminded that I need to watch this movie again. Only a single viewing in 20 years of what was one of my top ten movies of 2001. Need to rectify that.