Need something fun to kick off your weekend? Here’s a list of Israeli translations of American movie titles. Can you guess what the original movies were? Scroll down below the fold for the answers!
- “The Date That Screwed Me”
- “The Gun Died Laughing”
- “Crazy About the Moon” and the sequel, “Crazy About the Minions”
- “Breaking the Ice”
- “It’s Raining Falafel”
- “Agitated Women”
- “American Dream”
- “Woman of Valor”
- “Dancing with Pilots” and its sequel, “Dancing with Fighters”
- “Lost in Tokyo”
- “The 8th Passenger, 3”
- “Before the Wedding We Stop in Vegas”
- “Some Kind of Police Woman”
Answers:
- “Knocked Up”
- “The Naked Gun”
- “Despicable Me” and “Despicable Me 2”
- “Frozen”
- “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”
- “The Heat”
- “American Hustle”
- “Wonder Woman”
- “Hot Shot” 1 and 2, respectively
- “Lost in Translation”
- “Aliens 3”
- “The Hangover”
- “Miss Congeniality”
Movie titles can be quite difficult to translate , as there’s often quite a bit of nuance stuffed into a small package. Movie titles frequently contain double entendres and colloquial phrases, and those rarely translate well. As an unnamed translator explained to Haaretz.com, “If there’s an expression that’s doesn’t mean anything in Hebrew, we have to change it.”
Ronit Gilad-Herman, marketing manager at Nachshon Films, elaborated:
“You want people to go see the movies. If you can try with the original title, you do. Batman is Batman. But sometimes they just don’t mean anything.”
Sometimes, it seems like the Israeli translators just want to provide a little extra context. For example, according to the LA Times, Shrek spin-off “Puss in Boots” was renamed “The Cat From Shrek.”
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