This is my single greatest pet peeve around here--when the title of an Asian film is a word in a foreign language, that does not mean the actual title of that movie is that same word, spelled phonetically with a bad Japanese accent. The title of this movie is Zigeunerweisen. It is not a bizarre phonetic respelling of the word "Zigeunerweisen."
shareThe original title of this movie is in katakana, and that's why. If it was spelled alphabetically like Zigeunerweisen, it'd be Zigeunerweisen as well on imdb. It's rather simple.
The original title of this movie is WRITTERN IN KATAKANA ON THE BOX SO JAPANESE PEOPLE CAN READ IT! That doesn't make it the title of the movie. Unless Mr Suzuki was going for a bizarre parody of Japnese misspellings (and I wouldn't put it past him...) then this movie was intended to be titled, and should be referred to as Zigeunerweisen. Just because I can't speak French properly doesn't mean I can just discard the accents when writing French movie titles. Same thing here.
Ring is called, and was always intended to be called Ring and not RINGU
Laputa is taken from Gulliver's Travels and always was intended to be called Laputa not RAPYUTA
Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? is SANSKRIT not misspelled Sanskrit. It's the title chosen by the director. He didn't sit down and say "Ha ha I think I'l misspell some Sanskrit today!".
Etc. Etc, not that it'll make any difference at all...
IMDB is very strict about using the name that first appeared on the title screen of the film on the very first public showing.
Also, IMDB will only have Latin-derived alphabet characters appear (at least on the US version of the site). So if a film title first appeared in another non Latin-derived alphabet, they will tranpose the title back again to the english alphabet with the most common rules for doing so.
So if the very first showing of this movie showed a title in katakana, IMDB will display it as if it were a word transposed from katakana to the english alphabet. I know this may seem silly especially if the original katakana word was derived from English, so tranlating it that way and back again makes it sound weird.
The word "ring" cannot technically be spelled exactly the same in Japanese since the sound for a single "g" at the end of the word doesn't exist. So when people in Japan spell it and they want to use katakana instead of the English alphabet they will spell it the closet way possible, using the character that is technically pronounced "gu" at the end. Now I'm sure most Japanese people know the English word "ring" does not sound like "ringu" but if the original showing of the film used katakana on the title screen, IMDB wants to be as accurate as possible. Since it cannot display non Latin-derived alphabet characters, this is the only way it can indicate this.
It makes total sense to me.
"People should get beat up for stating their beliefs"
--They Might Be Giants
I never knew Jesus was able to speak in Sanskrit, but am never too old to learn.
In fact, the language Jesus spoke was Aramic. The words are transliterated from Greek and He quoted the first phrase of psalm 22.
Yes, and then LAPUTA in spanish have a derogatory meaning to prostitutes, so they changed the name of the island to LILIPUT. But this is still ZIGEUNERWEISEN, right?
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