Translation is more art than science, and as with any other form of translation, the translating of movie or book titles from one language to another can pose a slew of problems.

There are a number of questions that translators keep in mind when they translate titles: Should it be translated literally, or word for word? Is it more important that the spirit of the title be conveyed? Or would a foreign audience be more likely to see something with a different title altogether? Pop culture translators have to take marketing into consideration, and they often translate titles with hilarious results.

The popular 2013 film American Hustle is more challenging to translate than you might think, as “hustle” is a tricky American idiom. The title, which economically encapsulates everything that the film is about, lost some of its nuance when it was translated into certain other languages. In France, it was known as American Bluff; In Spain, The Great American Swindle (La gran estafa americana); and, most notably, in China it was called United States Cheat Bureau (美国骗局).

China is pretty well-known for their hilarious, if imperfect, movie title translations. Some of their best include Pretty Woman, which they titled I Will Marry A Prostitute to Save Money; G.I. Jane, which they called Satan Female Soldier; and — spoiler alert — the title for The Sixth Sensewas He’s A Ghost!

But by no means do the Chinese have the market cornered on bizarre title translations. The Terminator first came out in 1984, and while most opted to choose something close to the original title, there were a few outliers. In Hungary, the film was known as The Dealer of Death; in Portugal it was The Relentless Exterminator. But best of all was the title in Poland:Electronic Murder.

As for books, the Harry Potter series is one of the most popular the world has ever seen. The series has been translated into 67 different languages, and there have been some interesting and hilarious hiccups in the translation along the way.

The Mirror of Erised works in English because it’s a mirror that shows your desires, and ‘Erised’ is ‘Desire’ spelled backwards. In the German translation of the novel, they changed the name of the mirror in order to keep with J.K. Rowling’s original intention. They called it ‘Der Spiegel Nerhegeb’: because ‘begerhren’ is German for ‘desire’.

A unique challenge for any translator is when they face accents and dialects in the text they’re translating. In Harry Potter, Hagrid’s manner of speaking has always had a serious West Country inflection (hailing from the rural area in the South West of England). When the books were translated into Japanese, the translator approximated this casual, provincial sound by recreating Hagrid’s speech in the Tōhoku dialect.

Some of these translations are comical to a Western audience, but it’s curious to think about what those titles might do to influence a foreign audience’s experience of the material. For example, in Denmark, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was titled The Boy Who Drowned In Chocolate Sauce. How strange for them, then, when the titular character was eliminated from the narrative a quarter of the way through the story!