So much translation discourse just boils down to monolinguals not understanding that "coolness" doesn't translate across languages, and you need to re-add it manually on the other end.
Spanish and French understand the anglicism so just say "eso es muy cool" or "c'est très cool" if the context is not particularly formal
No no, not literally the word "cool" I mean the [concept of coolness]. Things that sound cool, poetic, funny, dramatic, etc in one language will completely fail to land if you simply go 1-to-1 word equivalents.
In the Japanese version of Fullmetal Alchemist, the antagonists are named after the seven deadly sins, in English. As in, rather than the Japanese word, "Greed" is still Greed in the original.
Because loan words from English are often pretty "cool", as with your Spanish and French example.
But this presents a problem, because, to give them a bit of flair, the antagonists are sometimes given a proper Japanese adjective along with their name, to make a sort of title of sorts.
"Greedy Greed"
The italicized part would be a Japanese adjective, and the bolded part is an English loanword. This is fine in Japanese, but would be totally nonsense in an English translation.
After all, it's common sense to keep the names the same, duh, and obviously the whole point of what you're doing is to translate the Japanese.
Greedy Greed. You cannot call him that.
You can't go 1-to-1. To keep the [concept of coolness], you have to identify what made the original cool, and then recreate it in the new language.
And here, we have a foreign word, and a native word, both meaning the same thing, paired together to give an antagonist a cool sounding title. So how do we do that in English.
Well, the seven deadly sins, being Christian and Catholic and all, have fancy names in Latin. Or well, they just sound fancy in English, because Latin was the language of intellectuals for a long long time.
And in fact, while we also have the word "greed", English has a fancier sounding word that means the same thing, but whose etymology comes from the fancy Latin. That might give a similar cool-loanword feeling, right?
Let's try it.
"Greed the Avaricious"
Oh yeah. That's definitely, undeniably, "cool".
To me, as a non-native English speaker, The Hunger Games is also a good example of this.
A big part of Katniss' character is how much of her life is focused around hunger itself. She has to hunt and gather illegally, just to survive and keep her family and community fed. She's never grown up with all the good things, we take for granted. That's part of why the title The Hunger Games is so cool in and of itself.
In Danish, on the other hand, the direct translation would be "Sult Spillene" - which is a bit of a mouthful to say, for one, but also just doesn't convey the same urgency or severity as the original.
Instead, Danish translators had to look at the bigger picture. And what are the Hunger Games? They're a game of death - and death is of a similar degree of coolness as hunger, as well as being an equally big part of Katniss' existence. So what did they rename it to? "Dødsspillet" - or in English: The Death Game. In English it's a little too on the nose, maybe, but to a Dane that hits home as cool.
On the other hand, things such as nicknames are also difficult to translate, especially if they're a play on words. Katniss' nickname is "Catnip" - and to make that particular joke/nickname work, the first translations had her name changed to Kattua. Sometimes, a translation might not even include the jokes or wordplay at all, if no suitable equivalent is available, meaning a lot of humor is lost. But that's better expanded on in a different post.
A great example of this can be seen in Shrek. In the English version In the movie there is a scene where Lord Farquaad is asking Gingerbread if he knows the Muffin Man and I say in the English version because in other translations (at least 3 that I know of) they used a character from a well-known nursery rhyme in said language, for example in Latin Spanish PinPon was used and I think that in the Spanish of Spain Mambru was used, both of which star in very typical and famous children's songs.
When the translators were transferring everything to the other language they had to invent these lines, but without them the scene itself would not make sense, because as a non-native English speaker if they had left The Muffin Man for me it would not have made any sense .
