I recall reading both "The Good Soldiers" (兵士は戦場で何を見たのか) & "Thank You For Your Service" (帰還兵はなぜ自殺するのか) by David Finkel in Japanese which have been renamed into _"What did soldiers saw at the battlefield?"_ or _"Why do returnees commit suicide?"_ , very different from the English original. The artwork for the front covers are different, the English one depicts troops in Iraq from inside a Humvee while the Japanese one depicts actual combat.
(Japanese books: translated from another language or originally Japanese written are always formatted from right to left with vertical text, even translated versions of works that are originally in English get the reading format mirrored, also the book dimensions do differ: English novels are larger while Japanese versions are smaller in comparison).
I mean, is this also present in European languages (i.e. German, Spanish) where a translated copy of literature that's originally published in English is called under a different title irrelevant from the source material alongside different cover art? The thing is, why are translated versions of books sometimes published under a completely different title and depending on the publishing house, why do they create their own front covers in the translated copy?
29 Jun 2026 17:12
This is quite common for dutch translations, I'm assuming the same would be true for German.
Afaik, the most common reason for this is marketing. Some titles just don't work well when translated directly and a bad title can directly affect sales.
29 Jun 2026 17:28
Twilight was sold in Germany under the dad-joke-level punny title _Bis(s) zum Morgengrauen_ ("Until dawn / Bite at dawn"
. They kept it up for the sequels _Bis(s) zur Mittagsstunde_ (noon), _Bis(s) zum Abendrot_ (sunset), _Bis(s) zum Ende der Nacht_ (end of the night)
29 Jun 2026 18:01
Yes? Who hasn't?
Changing (not just translating) the title is sometimes clearly necessary to preserve a joke or reference for people who don't speak the original language (otherwise they'd be reading that version already), but in most cases I find it unnecessary and just makes it hard to talk to others about it or find more info because you know it under completely unrelated names. The Wikipedia article translations about the author will sometimes mention them in a recognisable way, but sometimes not even that helps...
29 Jun 2026 18:06
The bot is back, right on schedule and with the predicted topic.
29 Jun 2026 18:13
I regularly read books in English and then in their French translation, out of curiosity. It happens less often the other way around (because there is, sadly for the US, a lot less French authors being translated into English) but I'll do it on occasions. I don't focus much on the cover, to be honest.
Why can the title be so different once translated (not all the time)? For the same reasons it a movie title can be so different too, I suppose: market studies and cultural context. The same with the cover design: what sells in the USA probably would not sell that well in a few European countries.
29 Jun 2026 18:25
i think it's the norm actually. mostly because sentence structure varies between languages and moving stuff around changes the meaning of the words.
it's a good question. i went through a similar thought recently when i read the sentence "in german, the first sentence of kafka's 'metamorphosis' is a whiplash because they put the verbs last".
29 Jun 2026 18:33
If you speak another language, have you read a book translated from English published under a different title?
Yes, to name a few:
1.
The Lord of the Rings in Hungarian (first language) whose cover art was different than many other cover arts. This is also a bad example in that there are so many variations of the cover art in English depending on publisher.
2.
The Hobbit in Swedish (first language) whose title different in that the translator made up a word for "hobbit" in Swedish ("hob", pronounced
hoob in English). 🤮
3.
Koto by Yasunari Kawabata in Swedish whose cover art is different than the one publication that I have of it in Japanese.
I mean, is this also present in European languages (i.e. German, Spanish) where a translated copy of literature that’s originally published in English is called under a different title irrelevant from the source material alongside different cover art?
Yes, see previous answer.
[...] why are translated versions of books sometimes published under a completely different title [...]
My guess is that in a case like
The Hobbit versus
Hoben (Swedish), the translator and the publisher wanted to make the title less foreign sounding and easier to pronounce. As for your own examples, I have been asking myself the same question on multiple occasions. Sometimes the translated title is either ridiculous or it straight out ruins the immersion. Really werid... The only case in which I don't think it's weird is if there are cultural aspects to it that otherwise make the title conceptually hard to grasp for the target population.
why do they create their own front covers in the translated copy?
Because artists love to artist. 🙃
29 Jun 2026 18:42
These things are usually not the author's work, but the publisher's. In another country, they do it differently. Why not? Maybe it isn't even related to the languge.
29 Jun 2026 18:43
Yes, several times. Usually translated from English to my native language. As soon as I was capable of reading the original, though, I switched. I've read a few tens of thousands English books in the original.
29 Jun 2026 19:30
Link to prediction?
I guess I'm ootl on this one.
29 Jun 2026 20:13
Lemmy
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