yoda-sama said:
So, knowing the French people were smart enough to figure it out, they didn't think twice about naming a magazine "Starfix", but someone thought a world wide box office smashing film titled "Star Wars" would be confusing? Always weird how hit and miss translations are on these things. Something very relevant, now that I think about it, is Eddie Izzard's standup bit about how it makes sense that the Keanu Reeves movie "Speed" would be translated to the French word for "Speed", but instead they inexplicably just left it as "Speed".
Oh, and I love (at least from this scan) how it seems Luke has a red saber and Vader has a blue one.
EDIT: LOL, Google Translate won't translate "Star Wars" to "la guerre des étoiles" unless I specifically type "The Star Wars", otherwise it just spits out "Star Wars".
Even weirder is that sometimes they will take an American film and give it a new title...in English.
Example: Silver Lining Playbook -> Happiness Therapy
The Hangover -> Very Bad Trip
Varsity Blues -> American Boys
No strings Attached -> Sex Friends
Having an English title gives it a certain cache, and I think it's catchy with the younger crowd who like mixing in English words with their speech more and more.
As far as not translating certain words directly... I think there are certain words that can be translated but that there is always something subtle missing in the translation. For example Speed is monosyllabic, and we automatically think of fast. It's quick to say and it sounds cool. La vitesse is the translation in French, but it doesn't sound as cool. When French people hear it, they don't really think of Fast right away, they see is as a quantifier of movement. Is it slow is it fast? It's clinical sounding and not very marketable.
It's like Jaws, which is translated in French as The Teeth of the Sea. They could have called it "Les Machoirs" (literally the jaws) but it sounds incredibly stupid. It takes its literal meaning and people might think it's a film about dentistry or something.