For one of my classes recently, I needed to get the Japanese movie version of Harper Lee's classic novel "To Kill a Mockingbird." When I looked for it on Amazon Japan, I was a little confused because they didn't seem to have it. Instead they kept offering me a DVD titled "Arabama monogatari" (「アラバマ物語」). It took me a while to figure out that this "Alabama Story," as it literally translates, was indeed the DVD I had been looking for; the title just happened to be a little, well, modified.

Japanese society is well-known for its skill at localizing foreign things. This applies not only to cars, curry and kanji characters, but seems to hold for movie titles as well. The sociolinguist Fumio Inoue in his 2001 book 「日本語は生き残れるか」 ("Nihongo wa Ikinokoreruka?" "Will Japanese Survive?") had a close look at a large number of foreign movie titles and identified three basic strategies to accommodate them to the domestic box office.

The first one is what he calls iyaku (意訳), a (very) free Japanese translation based on the contents or overall atmosphere of a film. Examples are the 1940 remake of "Waterloo Bridge," which was featured in Japan as "Aishū" (「哀愁」, "Pathos"), or the 1955 American/British coproduction "Summertime," which was presented to Japanese audiences as "Ryojō" (「旅情」, "Emotions of a Traveler"). Note that in both cases the new title has little in common with the original English one. The Japanese rendition of "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a similar case.