![]() Back in London the incident in Mexico has reached the media, M is furious over Bond conducting an unauthorized mission as MI6 is in the middle of a shake up, merging with MI5 and the possibility of cancellation of the 00 program. Sciarra leaves the building and Bond chases him to the city square where an escape helicopter lands, Bonds boards and scuffles with Sciarra and the pilot, Bond steals a ring off of Sciarra and then ejects him and the pilot from the craft in the continued brawl, Bond flies off and exams the ring which bears an octopus motif. Bond opens fire triggering a briefcase bomb which destroys most of the building. They speak of conducting a terror attack on a stadium, then Sciarra will go to see someone known as "The Pale King". Luckily, there seems to be a fashion recently to use unaltered original titles also in Germany: Game of Thrones, Sin City 2 - A Dame to kill for, The Equalizer, Dracula Untold.Īnd sometimes, they even manage the unthinkable and do a straight translation: Night at the Museum became Nachts im Museum.James Bond is in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead looking for an Italian named Marco Sciarra, the latter is meeting with associates in an apartment block, Bond listens in using a planted bug. One or two words as a title seem to give German distributors feelings of agoraphobia or something. German distributors are obsessed with sub-titles, and the sillier the better it seems: Maze Runner - Die Auserwählten im Labyrinth. And that´s not considering that the German sub-title takes away most of the wittiness of the original title. I understand that the brilliant title The Hurt Locker is probably a word construction not easily understandable for many Germans (but then does the average English or American audience immediately get its meaning?), but the German title Tödliche Entscheidung, while absolutely not beside the point as far the content is concerned, has the poetic value of a generic 80s or 90s action flic.Īnd then you have Prometheus - Dunkle Zeichen (Dark/Sinister Signs): Are the English and American audiences better versed in Greek mythology than us, so that we need an additional sub-title? Hardly. I´m lucky that many of my recent favorites, like Godzilla, The Raid, and even The Wolf of Wall Street and Four Lions, retained their original titles. While the long-standing dubbing tradition even for cinematic screenings has spoiled a huge number of Germans into believing they won´t understand a film in the English original, the real problem I have with many German titles is that they take away the wit and poetic value of the original in many cases. And though they may not represent the entire German market, it's definitely an indication that Germany doesn't need to have English film titles translated. Just take a look around: I don't think our German members are anything but fluent in English. Our German friends can handle SPECTRE and what it stands for. So I truthfully question the necessity for a "translation" of a title, especially a one-word title. It's not like English is to German what New Delhi dialect number 73 is to English. ![]() So again, lest I be mistaken here, I respect the Germans more than those two or three people who make the decision to replace a perfectly simple English title with another. There's still the option of subtitles, right? :)Īnd looking at that list, when even DN and TB need another title, something is clearly wrong. I dread the idea of watching the film with Craig and everybody else in the film dubbed in German. ![]() Besides, SPECTRE is an acronym but SPECTRE itself is just a reasonably simple word. ) So again, the German movie market should by now have realised it's not a problem to release a film under its English title. come on, us Europeans here in the West, we practically grow up with music, movies, comics. They can do that with for example Russian, Chinese or Bollywood titles since I presume hardly a full percentage of the German population speaks or understands Russian, Chinese or Hindi. I did specifically mention the German distributors, who clearly make the choice themselves to translate English movie titles. ![]() I never implied that you made a comment on the Germans and their knowledge of English. ![]()
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