what is the English translation for Marebito?

[deleted]

I think the actual title translation is "the stranger from afar," at least that's what it was upon watching the subtitled version of it.

At the start of the dvd copy I saw it had "Marebito - Stranger from Afar", so I just took that as the translation.

Here in Spain it was titled "Seres Extraños" (literally, "Strange Beings"), so it may not be that far.

/lol/ here in mexico they always screw titles up...

Here Marebito is called "Terror Encadenado" in english, "chained horror" far far away from the original meaning.

It's not hard to belive it when they translated "the hills have eyes" as "el despertar del diablo" "Devil's Awakening" It's hillarios...


"They Made me Do It "

From what's written on the DVD cover, and I'm translating this from the Chinese language point of view, it literally means "rare human". In Chinese, the literal translation with the 2 characters put together, does not translate into a noun. (Although Japanese sometimes use the proper form of Chinese characters, the meanings are often different). We can infer from the "literal" translation loosely as strange, kind of unique, human beings you don't normally meet or find.

Hope this helps.

I'm not a native speaker of Japanese, but I think this is a kind of word game or made-up word like "Ju-on." Marebito written with these characters literally means "rare" or "unusual" and "person," but in old Japanese the word "marebito" (customarily written with different characters) just means someone who comes to visit (from afar), hence "rare person." Not that anything makes much sense in this film though, so I wouldn't worry too much about parsing the title...

According to various dictionaries I think it's better to render "mare" as "rare/seldom" rather than "strange/unusual", even though "unusual" and "rare" sometimes may have more or less the same meaning. Nevertheless, the whole word "marebito" yields no entries in any online dictionary I've tried, so I guess it's not considered a usual term, but rather a special compound word that someone came up with. The overall meaning of "rare/unusual person" is reasonably clear, yet it sounds kind of awkward in English. Thus maybe the freer translation in "the stranger from afar" is better after all, even though I can't quite see the justification for it in the original Japanese word.