Ever come across novels which, due to translation quirks or other reasons, end up with strangely ambiguous or highly suggestive titles? Like this: I Became A Flashing Genius At The Magic Academy When I first glanced at it, I had to do a double-take; I genuinely imagined for a moment a protagonist running around déshabillé under an overcoat and giving passersby, with a flourish, an unimpeded view of his unrestrained majesty. Share yours too... the titles, I mean.
Not a novel but a few days ago I saw a reddit post about "I broke up with my boyfriend last night coz he had an only fans". I thought the boyfriend was the one posting stuff, turns out he's more of a customer and the fight was about how he doesn't even want to delete it at all which was a deal breaker for the girl. Oh, for novels, My civil servant life reborn in a strange world? I didn't see much civil servant things happening.
Yes, seen it more with manga/Manhua/etc though as there the translator is too often looking only at the one chapter, or even speech bubble, at a time. Or just MTL and posting chapters for ad/begged $. But did not bother looking into the even description of the series. Many seem to be cases where there are multiple "valid" translations if you ignore context, and the issue is either guessing of not having a tight enough grasp of at least one of the 2 languages involved to figure out the right context to use.
Quick Transmigration: Male Lead, You’re Overpowered? This one is very misleading bc in almost all the arcs the female MC is the one who is overpowered and is 100x more powerful than the ML (THe ML is the one depending on MC which is ironic considering the title). Basically the premise of each arc is the OP MC helping the ML becoming overpowered at the end. Example is the xianxia arc when the MC is already at the peak of cultivation and she becomes the ML's master, then the ML progress from being the weakest to being the 2nd strongest (after MC). Not that I'm complaining because it's a very fresh trope in CN Romance novels. This novel would be almost perfect if not for the first arc.
I Became A "Flashing" Genius At The Magic Academy Was expecting novel with adult and Voyeurism tags, but no.
Poorly translated Chinese titles have been a bugbear of mine dating back to even before I learned Chinese. Chinese titles specifically are meant as figurative phrases that convey a general sense of what the book is about or what theme it means to convey. The problem is that translators tend to translate these titles literally and doing so will usually mangle whatever the writer was trying to convey, and that's if the translation doesn't get mashed up to begin with. Even worse, there are translations that aren't based on the original title to begin with so they are just hilariously off. Let's use Jin Yong's 神鵰俠侶 as an example. The common English translation for it is "Return of the Condor Heroes", and on the face of it, it isn't too bad. The book is a sequel to "the Legend of the Condor Heroes", and the titular protagonists of that book feature do prominently in this one. The problem is that the sequel's title refers to a different set of protagonists, and the old protagonists largely act as antagonists to the new set. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that "Return of the Condor Heroes" bears no similarity to the original title. The question then is where does this title come from? The answer is that a Hong Kong production company adapted both shows to television and these were the English titles they used. The first show was a runaway smash hit so they used it as a way to draw attention to the sequel and subsequent references just use the TV translations as is because of how famous they. To be fair, there really isn't a good way to translate 神鵰俠侶 to English, and this is true for a lot of Chinese titles. A lot of these are based on specific turns of phrase, or references to events or sayings, or would just sound awkward in English so I think it's fair to be more forgiving of these.
a lot of jp novels are misleading. like it's something about cooking or dark magic in them long titles tht tare a full two sentences my English teacher would have added like 5 commas to. they describe a very small part of the plot and then the rest has nothing to do with the title at all.