The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #128205 Message #2867551
Posted By: MGM·Lion
19-Mar-10 - 07:58 AM
Thread Name: BS: Unsuitably translated film titles
Subject: BS: Unsuitably translated film titles
Unsuitably translated film titles ~~
In the course of researching background to put an entry on the recent up-there thread as to whether it was bluebells or strawberries which grew in the salt sea, I was reminded of the title of one of Ingmar Bergman's most famous films, whose English title was Wild Strawberries. I had never understood the point of this title; but I then discovered in Wiki that "The original Swedish title is Smultronstället, which literally means "the wild strawberry patch", but idiomatically means an underrated gem of a place (often with personal or sentimental value)."
So at last the title made sense to me; but I cannot help feeling the English language distributors could have found a more meaningful title, as the phrase "wild strawberries" has no idiomatic significance in English at all, so that the name was merely puzzling.
Another example of a similar misjudgment relates to Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups, which is always called in English The 400 Blows, which means sod-all. But in French, the idiom 'faire les quatre cents coups' [the number of hundreds may vary] means to create a dust-up, kick up a fuss, 'paint the town red'... Couldn't they have found a more meaningful title for the Anglo-American distribution, rather than this boring and meaningless literal translation?