Off the off topic: why is the English world so intent on translating everything? (Much like the French world I guess)
In the Dutch speaking part of Belgium we try to refer to most movies in their original language (Das Leben Der Anderen, Cidade De Deus, ...), though we do seem to have trouble with Asian titles where we for some obscure reason default to using the English title. Edit: We do translate children's movies.
Because America has few close neighbors (close as in geographically and as in relations) who speak a foreign language and also produce media Americans consume on a regular basis. Americans don't need to learn a foreign language, and when they do it's difficult to get real-world practice. Canadian French and Mexican Spanish are the only two an American would generally run into, and only infrequently. I speak German and Canadian French and struggle to find reasons to use those languages.
It irritates me when Europeans get upset about American lack of "worldliness" (for lack of a better term). The US is bigger than the entire European Union, has only one de facto language, and is removed from the rest of the world by 3,000 miles of water on each side. Of course Americans aren't constantly running into people from other countries/cultures, we have states that are bigger than many European sovereign nations. I can drive 3000 miles (~5000km) from New York to LA and encounter nothing but America and English.
In Europe, that would get you from Brugge to Burgas and back, going through Belgium, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. And back. Lisbon is closer to Helsinki than New York is to LA.
> Of course Americans aren't constantly running into people from other countries/cultures
Really? Not to sound like a prick but you must live in the middle of nowhere. I live in LA (santa monica, to be exact). I live next to an eastern European deli, kosher jewish, multiple Chinese restaurants, sushi, ramen, and yaki joints, thai, Peruvian, Mexican, Korean, Caribbean/Jamaican/Cuban Vietnamese, French, German, Ethiopian, Greek, Italian, "middle eastern", persian, mediterranean, russian restaurants / groceries / communities / -owned businesses/ the list goes on and on and on. And of course good ol' american BBQ, burgers and beer, standard fast food, ice cream, southern soul food, tex mex, east coast seafood, southern creole, ...
Many people come here from around the world to work in professional jobs, also. And many students and faculty at UCLA, LMU, USC, SMC, etc, etc.
It's just that many of those people all speak English, can act 100% "American" when they need to, and their cultures have become a seamless part of American culture. This is something else many non-Americans don't understand (and Americans don't see even though it's right under their noses).
In fact, if you count the languages that "Americans" including 1st and 2nd generation immigrants speak, it's vast.
Ugly truth: It's just that a lot of Europeans don't count asians, hispanics, blacks, as Americans, so you hear this crap all the time on the internet due to racism and stereotypes of what America is and isn't.
This goes beyond the point at hand. I'm not necessarily disagreeing (I'm not from the US), but we're discussing the compulsive need to translate culture, present in the US but in other parts of the world (like aforementioned french-speaking world).
Trying to define the racial "identity" of what's American and who consider it such is a slight straw man. Regardless of who is or isn't American, and what languages they speak, we're discussing the need for "original" titles.
Here in France, referring to the movie by its title "Das Leben Der Anderen" would raise eyebrows at best, it would often get you dismissed as pedantic douche. In other parts of the world, it's a given that you just don't translate titles.
It's not a strawman, it's the exact argument that freehunter posed (that americans never see 'foreigners'). I'm refuting it by saying no, that's not true, and the global idea of what an american vs. what a foreigner is cloudy at best.
I didn't mean to imply that Americans never encounter foreigners, but that they never encounter an area where they have to speak another language and deal with another foreign culture.
Think of it in this context: when I travel to Illinois, the people there are still American and still speak English. When a Danish person travels to Belgium (same distance, ~400 miles), they are now in a country where they speak Dutch/German/French and have a Belgian culture. There are almost 10 million Belgians in Belgium, there are just over 350,000 in the US. Of those, how many speak French, how many speak Dutch, and how many speak German? I'll bet almost all of them speak English.
I live in a large Midwestern city (not Chicago), so we do have people of other cultures who speak different languages, but like you said, they don't speak other languages to those around them. If a Bulgarian goes to Spain, they have to speak Spanish. Only a small portion of Spanish people will be able to talk in Bulgarian. On the other hand, if I'm in New York and go to LA (a longer distance than Bulgaria to Spain), everyone still speaks English, even if they're not originally from the US.
The US has a wide variety of American cultures, and only a small disparate minority of foreign cultures.
Another reason why Americans (and Canadians and Brits and Australians) don't need to learn foreign languages: many other people speak English as well. I spent the summer in Germany two years ago. I am conversational in German, but when I would talk to someone they sometimes picked up on my accent or my use of a grammatically proper word that didn't necessarily fit with modern German trends. About 50% of them instantly switched to English. Of those 50%, only about 30% went back to German when I said "auf Deutsch, bitte." What it ended up being was me speaking in German and getting responses in English. They were all too happy to use me to practice their English.
We don't need to learn a foreign language, because a large number of non-English people speak English anyway.
I think you got off topic just to make your point. I grew up in the bay area and have known people from every color of the rainbow, but the only group large enough to use their own language outside of familial situations are latin-americans.
This is why a lot of native-english-speaking Californians speak at least a cursory amount of spanish, but nothing else. (unless they specifically took courses in high school or college, but thats a small amount of people)
Interestingly enough, you will sometimes see latin-american movie titles in spanish (eg El Norte, Y tu madre tambien). I'm sure it doesn't happen as often as in Europe, but it still relates to the original point.
If you grew up in the bay then you should know that Asians and have plenty of opportunities amongst friends and around town to use languages other than English.
Then again, if you're white... you may not have been around during those times.
There are pockets of asian communities, but spanish is ubiquitous.
But you may be right about me not being there. Latin-americans may be more willing to speak spanish around non-spanish speakers. The numbers just work out that way.
My personal theory on this is that spanish speakers have been in California longer than English speakers (thereby having feelings of relative native status), while various Asian language speakers feel the obligation to include non-speakers in their discussions when said non-speakers are around because asians and anglos have been in the bay for roughly the same amount of time (since the gold rush).
Although ... Asian language speakers never feel the need for linguistic inclusion when hispanics are around. Not sure about the dynamics on that one. Might just be good ol' fashioned racism.
He probably does live in the middle of nowhere. I live near DC now (and lived in Germany for 3 years) and run into the same types of places you mention - ethnic stores and restaurants of all persuasions. However, I grew up in Arkansas and you'd be surprised how homogenous it was. In some of the bigger towns (I'm talking >10k) you might start to find ethnic restaurants, for example, but I rarely saw anything else you could call ethnic.
So while your experience is common for the larger cities and urbanized areas of the US, I would wager for vast swathes of the rural areas of the country the experience is more like my time in Arkansas.
Even in these neighborhoods in LA, you never have to travel to an area where the road signs are printed exclusively in the language of a foreign culture or the money is printed in another currency (something Europe is getting on board with at the advent of the Euro).
"why is the English world so intent on translating everything?"
Because in big countries like Germany, France or Spain people could survive without speaking another language, so they do not understand those names and can't remember them. In super-countries like China, USA or Russia this effect is even stronger.
Belgium is a small country linked to commerce in the world, and is fairly typical to have normal people speak 3-4 languages.
An American could die speaking only her native tongue without the need to learn anything else being able to work over an extension that is bigger than Europe, or just ask for using it whenever in the world she is.
Unlikely to be true A/B testing. More likely that it would be a series of focus groups where they basically get the opinions of a group of people on them. This doesn't measure the actual impact of sales from the title so I'm not sure it's true A/B testing.
On that trend of off topics, I was part of a small movie buff group back in Lebanon. Nothing fancy, we just liked to meet and discuss movies we watched and liked. Clearly no title was ever translated. Movies weren't even dubbed (blasphemy!), subtitled if necessary.
Now I live in Paris, every time I get in touch with my old buddies they make fun of me for referring to movies by their French titles. Sucks big time ...
German and French titles: yes definitely. Portuguese (like my aforementioned Cidade de Deus)? No, safe some exceptions nobody knows beforehand what it means. Guess we're just used to finding it out afterwards, eg an article about the film could mention a translation in the body.
In some cases, foreign films have English titles anyway without translation. A lot of Japanese anime have entirely English titles, for instance, or are dual-titled in Japanese and English.
In the Dutch speaking part of Belgium we try to refer to most movies in their original language (Das Leben Der Anderen, Cidade De Deus, ...), though we do seem to have trouble with Asian titles where we for some obscure reason default to using the English title. Edit: We do translate children's movies.