Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Do Engrish Titles Only Sometimes Get Corrected For America?
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Chagen46
 Posts: 4377 |
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I once came up with the title for a joke LN called Ore wa zettai hanyō no hito desu, soshite yūsha ni noborimasen naraba, shinin desu! (俺わ絶対汎用の人です、そして勇士に上りませんならば、死人です!); the title is supposed to be "I'm an Absolutely Generic Person, and therefore if I Don't Become a Hero, I'm a Dead Man!" The idea was that the MC was such a boring and generic anime MC, that the world went out balance and a ton of crazy shit started to happen (mecha start falling from the sky, magical girls appear from a portal, etc.). At that point, a Goddess appears before him, throws down a sword, and tells him that he's gotta be the one to fix all this shit, and become a "Hero"--an interesting person. However, I like to go underground and non-mainstream with my chuuni--I prefer Sanskrit over Japanese. |
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Videogamep
 Posts: 564 Location: CA |
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That's three words. 
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Touma
 Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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They are pirates who operate in space, and they are bodacious. The title makes perfect sense to me. After all these years I still do not know if "Plastic Little" is supposed to have some particular meaning? And what about "Girls Bravo"? "Girls" is obvious, but what does "Bravo" mean in that context. |
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Nemoide
Posts: 20 |
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I'm not so sure if that's the pun they're going for just because I've noticed "I My Me" popping up in other anime. For instance Popotan's characters are Ai, Mai, and Mii. And IIRC there's a song in The World God Only Knows (another title that's kind of Engrishy) that has a line of "I My Me." My 100% made-up-myself-hypothesis is that it relates to how Japanese students learn English in school. So it's an English word combination that's easily recognizable. As for favorite Engrishy titles, I'm a fan of "Here is Green Wood." The laserdiscs include a weird, possibly made-up explanation about how "greenwood" refers to a gathering place for thieves and I have no idea where they got that from. I've also always thought that Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom is comically redundant. |
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DuchessBianca
 Posts: 562 |
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I've never personally cared about what the title of an anime is as most of the time I only ever use it when I'm searching for the Bluray/DVD set to purchase but I do enjoy a lot of them especially the more wacky ones
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Lili-Hime
 Posts: 569 |
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I loved this title! Made it sound like some cheesy early 90's thing. It's still stupid though. The original translating to 'mini-skirt pirates' would've been false advertising though the show really isn't about fan service. |
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AtoMan
Posts: 161 |
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Well, not everyone is as lucky as US customers 
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Penguin_Factory
 Posts: 732 Location: Ireland |
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I remember hearing about Bakuretsu Tenshi before it came out (does anyone remember that show?) prior to release, under the translated name "Exploding Angel"; apparently Burst Angel is more accurate, but I always kind of wished they went with the other version because it sounds hilarious.
I was always very thankful that Haibane Renmei just stuck with the Japanese title instead of trying to translate it, as I can't think of any version of "Charcoal Feather Alliance" (or whatever the name translates to) that isn't incredibly awkward.
I was always curious about that one.
It's actually the name of a band, which is even funnier. Dude Who Made Clannad Whose Name I Can't Remember thought it meant family. "Clann" is the word a parent or head of the family would use to describe their family unit collectively, so he wasn't that far off. |
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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Well I'll have to defer to someone who knows Japanese on that one, but since the show is about a guy who cross-dresses to get a job as a middle school teacher and ends up with students of both genders hitting on him, aiming for that kind of ambiguous double meaning would make sense, especially given how much Japanese comedy seems to love puns. In a similar vein there's Ai Mai! Moe Can Change! which is a short comedy OVA that was made as a tie-in to a mobile game and has characters who are constantly changing each others' clothing and appearances with a push of their app buttons. Whatever the original intention of the phrase, though, it still sounds pretty goofy in transliteration. |
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JennLegacy
Posts: 108 |
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Off the top of my head, the funniest ones are actually those ridiculous taglines like "Rolling Girls: Rolling, Falling, Scrambling Girls. For others. For themselves. Even if they're destined to be a 'mob'" and "Symphogear: Meteoroid-Falling, Burning, and Disappear, Then..."
[C] - The Money of Soul and Possibility Control, Alice in the Hearts, Medarots (I'm honestly not sure if this is supposed to be a pun or not), and especially Gosick are also pretty great. |
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AtoMan
Posts: 161 |
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"Medabots" in the dub, "Medarot" in original, which most likely was supposed to be "Medalot".
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BodaciousSpacePirate
 Subscriber Posts: 3018 |
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Flashback to me in early 2013: "Well, there's no way I'm ever going to watch a show called Bodacious Space Pirates." |
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jenny10-11
Posts: 98 Location: Australia |
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The Attack on Titan title always made me think it was a sci-fi space mecha story, so I didn't watch it for a long time. Of course, Attack of the Titans sounds like a 90's sports movie, so it's basically a no-win situation
The only other Engrish title I can think of that hasn't already been mentioned is All You Need Is Kill. That was fixed for the movie by calling it Edge of Tomorrow. |
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GrayArchon
Posts: 393 |
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Yeah, that's kind of one of the fallacies of the claim that the official translators have access to the original author to ask these kinds of questions. A lot of the time, they have to go through layers of bureaucracy, any one of which could say 'no, we already know this' or 'this isn't worth bothering the author over' leaving questions left unanswered. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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Blast of Tempest is a really silly one, because they used neither the perfectly reasonable direct translation of the title--Isolated Tempest--nor the also decent and already-in-English subtitle, "The Civilization Blaster." Instead, they took one word from the former and one from the latter to create something that sounds super awkward. I'd sure love to know how that ended up happening... maybe they just wanted the two coolest-sounding words at all costs?
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