Have you ever wondered why a film was titled “Up – Kohti Korkeuksia” or “Inside Out – Mielen Sopukoissa”? Why is a superhero film about Spider-Man titled only in English as “The Amazing Spider-Man”? In this blog text we attempted to find out some of the variations happening in the translations of film titles in Finland and possible reasons for them. For the reasons of creating a contemporary view on the variations of film titles we decided to look into films created between the years 1993 and 2016.
Some of the films we looked into were children’s animated movies by Disney and it seems that throughout the 2000s, the most common practice regarding the titles of children’s films has still clearly been the translation of titles into Finnish, e.g. Treasure Planet / Aarreplaneetta (2002), Cars / Autot (2006) and Brave / Urhea (2012). There are, however, some examples where the original English title is not translated at all, e.g. Valiant (2005), Bolt (2008) and Frankenweenie (2012). This may be due to the fact that Valiant, Bolt and Frankenweenie are also names of characters and not just the names of the films.
We also looked into a list of romantic films and their titles from which approximately half of them were presented in their original English title (e.g. Just Go With It (2011) and Love, Rosie (2014)). The other half were translated, however, at least partially as in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World / Scott Pilgrim vastaan maailma (2010), but a large amount of romantic films in Finland are translated completely into Finnish even when the original title is difficult to translate in order to capture the original idea of the title. Although it is interesting to notice, however, that not one of the films in the list combined English and Finnish.
It’s not probably a surprise to anyone reading this blog, but a large chunk of the films in Finnish cinemas hail from the US and precisely Hollywood, and because of this we decided to include two of the most popular superheroes appearing on screen regularly. The old classic superhero Batman has had its share in films over a few decades but Spider-Man, even though a classic in comic books, has only really been on screen since the beginning of the 2000s. There were surprising and incoherent variations in the translations of the films depicting the adventures of these two heroes, moving slightly towards English, however. For more information you can read our essay.
But what is the film scene without science fiction films, which test our imagination and fill our heads with impossible possibilities and worlds? So with good reason we finally looked into Sci-Fi film titles which have changes a bit in the 2000s. The Star Wars “prequel trilogy” film titles (1999-2005) were translated by keeping the brand name “Star Wars” in the beginning and only translating the sub-title (e.g. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones / Episodi II: Kloonien hyökkäys (2002)). A shift towards complete English titles has happened, however, in the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) film, which seems to be the coming trend throughout the genres.
If you wish to learn more, an essay on this topic may be accessed by clicking HERE.
English in Finland 