I've been wondering about this for some time. I get that translation is an ambiguous business, difficult choices have to be made to preserve nuance and meaning and all, but sometimes people will just straight up give up on the original title and come up with something else, and I do not understand why.
The House of the Spirits is called "愛と精霊の家" in Japanese, literally "The House of Spirits and Love". Why? Why would you just randomly fucking add that?
Norwegian Wood by Murakami is called "ノルウェイの森", "Norwegian Wood", in Japanese. And then in German they changed it to "Naokos Lächeln". "Naoko's Smile". Why. These are perfectly good words and they exist in German. Why would you do this.
"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is called "Män som hatar kvinnor" in Swedish, which means "Men who hate women". Why. What is the point. Why do this.
Feel free to add your own examples, but I'm mostly interested in reasoning. Maybe someone here works in translation or publishing and can shed some light on that? I just flat out don't understand why these changes are made, who makes those calls, who authorizes that. Clearly none of these examples are ambiguous or anything, this is not the vagaries of translation, people are just randomly changing titles.
by ksarlathotep