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Monday, June 15th, 2026

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Foreign language episode titles

This is in part a follow-up to this thread.  First of all, does the policy of always using the episode title from the original release apply to all episodes, or only those which were never released in English?  The earlier thread consistently refers to "translated" titles, which would seem to imply that the policy applies only to episodes never released in English, but it's not entirely clear.

Assuming that this policy applies to all episodes, I have two major concerns with that.  One is that this makes navigating those episodes very confusing for viewers who are only familiar those episodes in another language.  Wouldn't it be better to have titles listed for every language an episode has been released in, and allow site visitors to view the titles which correspond to their own language?

My second concern is to do with languages not written in a conventional alphabet, such as Japanese.  Looking over four anime series, I found that two of them use the English language titles, and two use romanizations of the Japanese titles, which troubles me because so far as I know, the Japanese titles have no official romanization.  I realize that putting titles in kanji and other writing systems not represented on a standard keyboard may not be practical, but user-chosen romanizations are obviously not official titles, and I don't understand why anyone would prefer them over official English titles.

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2 months ago

Hi MartinIII-

Thank you for the feedback! For titles, we use the original title and in its original language as it appears on screen. For episodes, for example, we want the the original episode title upon first release.

We allow alternative titles for series but we currently do not support them for episode pages. Therefore, we encourage you to post and vote on this idea thread.

For the Japanes titles, I encourage you to review our following Help Guide.

Cheers!

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@Maya​ 

is the information you wrote here regarding languages on episode titles,  available on the help pages anywhere?

If not, should it maybe be added to tis page?

https://help.imdb.com/article/contribution/titles/episode-guidelines/GDF7HR6CCCBKU3CP?ref_=helpsrall#   

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@Maya​ To be honest, I find the help guide you've linked very confusing.  You say IMDb always uses the original title, and it was already my understanding that alternate titles for episodes are not supported.  But near the beginning of the help guide it says "Wherever an English source text cannot be translated into Kanji or Hiragana; or wherever it seems more appropriate to use the English term for ease of understanding, please transliterate it phonetically into Katakana. As a rule-of-thumb, if you have to think very hard to translate an English word then use the English transliteration into Katakana instead."

I've read that over three times and I can't see any other interpretation but that it's instructions on how to submit unofficial Japanese titles for films and movies that have not been released in Japanese.  If that's not it, then what is it talking about?

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