Translation can also completely rename a book. Perhaps the original title doesn't translate well; or perhaps it contains a very culture-specific reference; or maybe the translator wanted something catchier. Whatever the reason, here are some well-known books that got renamed in translation:
- Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust is known in the original French as À la recherche du temps perdu. The names of the individual books of AlRdTP were also changed. There is now a revised English version (still based on the original Moncrieff and Kilmartin translation) that carries the much more literally-translated title, In Search of Lost Time.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Бесы (Besy) has been variously translated as The Possessed, The Devils, and Demons.
- Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis clos (`closed hearing'; or, as Jurph informs me, `sequestered'; or, as Gritchka informs me, `in camera') is almost universally known in English as No Exit.
- Michel Foucault's Mots et Choses (`words and things') became The Order of Things.
- Vermischte Bermerkungen (`miscellaneous remarks'), a collection of remarks on various topics culled from Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebooks, is known in English as Culture and Value.
- Jorge Luis Borges's short story ``Hombre de la esquina rosada'' is sometimes translated literally as ``Man on Pink Corner'', but often as ``Streetcorner Man''.