Part 8: The Title That Was a Spoiler: Attack on Titan and the Virtue of Bad English

Attack on Titan is not a correct translation of Shingeki no Kyojin, and it is not really English, and it is on the Japanese covers, and Hajime Isayama put it there himself.

Take the Japanese apart. Shingeki (進撃) is an advance, a charge — attack in the sense of attacking motion, the forward surge of an army. Kyojin (巨人) is a giant. And no (の) is the particle that links them: roughly possessive, roughly attributive. A no B is B of A, B belonging to A, B characterized by A.

So Shingeki no Kyojin is something like The Advancing Giant. The Giant of the Charge. A giant defined by going forward.

It is singular. It is about a giant — not about humans fighting giants. And crucially, the giant is the one doing the attacking: the phrase points at the titan, not at an assault upon it.

"Attack on Titan," parsed as English, says roughly the reverse: an attack directed onto a thing called Titan. If it parses at all. Mostly it does not — "on Titan" wants to be a place, Saturn's moon, and there is no verb, and the whole construction sits in the mouth wrong.

The Author Did It

The reflex is to blame a licensing department. Not here. The English title was chosen on the Japanese side, appears on the Japanese volumes, and is Isayama's own. It is wasei-eigo — English-derived material made in Japan, for Japanese readers, chosen substantially for how it looks and sounds rather than for what it says to a native speaker. Part 9 is entirely about that, so I will not spend it here. The relevant fact is that nobody translated this title. It arrived pre-crossed, slightly broken, by design.

The numbers register the movement dutifully and pointlessly: Shingeki no Kyojin is a Destiny 6, Attack on Titan is a Destiny 5. The alarm goes off. It always goes off. It has never once told me anything about these two titles except that they are spelled differently, which I could see.

The Spoiler That Sat There for Nine Years

Now the good part.

Late in the series, Isayama reveals that 進撃の巨人 is a proper noun. It is the name of a specific Titan — one of the Nine, a particular inherited power with a particular holder. The Attack Titan. And Eren has it.

The title was never a description of the premise. It was never "humanity is attacked by giants." It was, from volume one, the name of the protagonist's power, printed on the cover of every volume, in plain sight, for years, while everyone read it as scene-setting. It is a spoiler nobody could see because it was disguised as a genre label — one of the great long cons in serialized fiction.

Isayama comes out a Destiny 7, the Analyst and Seeker, analysis, secrecy, and the search for truth. A pleasing accident on a man who buried a nine-year secret on the front cover, and an accident is all it is: he has the letters he has.

Why the Broken Title Was the Right One

Here is the argument, and it runs against everything this series has said so far.

Suppose the English title had been good. Suppose a competent, respectful translator had rendered it properly.

The Advancing Giant. Clear, accurate, faithful — and it makes the reveal obvious. A singular giant, named in the title, defined by advancing? Readers would have been hunting for that specific titan from volume one. The con collapses, because good English resolves: the phrase means something, and what it means is the answer.

Or suppose they had gone commercial — Attack of the Titans. Clean, punchy, plural, and it destroys the reveal from the other side: now the title is definitively about a category of monster, and when the Attack Titan turns up as an individual, the title cannot retrofit. It has already committed to a plural. The reveal has nowhere to land.

"Attack on Titan" does neither, because it does not mean anything.

It is inert. It refuses to parse, so an English reader's brain gives up on it in about a second and files the whole string as the name of the show — an opaque label, like Bleach, not a sentence making a claim. And an opaque label is exactly, precisely what the Japanese title secretly was: a proper noun wearing a description's clothes.

So when the reveal lands, the English title absorbs it without a fight. There is no prior reading to overturn, because there was never a reading. "Attack on Titan" turns out to be a name — and it had always been sitting there being a name, because it was too broken to be anything else.

The bad English preserved the ambiguity that good English would have resolved. Not through anyone's cleverness: Isayama picked it in 2009 for how it sounded, and nobody was playing this deep. It is luck. But it is luck of a specific and instructive kind — a translation that fails to communicate can occasionally transmit more than one that succeeds, because the original's meaning was withheld on purpose, and a competent rendering would have leaked it.

Every other essay in this series has been about a crossing that lost something. This is the one where the crossing kept a secret that a better translator would have spilled.

Yeager, Jaeger, and the Coin-Flip Again

The same series reruns Part 2, and it is worth thirty seconds.

The protagonist's surname is written エレン・イェーガー. The official English is Eren Yeager. A large part of fandom writes Eren Jaeger, on the grounds that the name is German — Jäger, hunter — which fits a cast of Germanic names in a story with a nineteenth-century European surface, and which is almost certainly what Isayama had in mind.

Both are defensible. Neither is wrong, exactly. It is Zoro and Zolo again: a Japanese string that does not commit to a Latin spelling, and two editors flipping the same coin differently.

And, as in Part 2, the arithmetic treats a coin-flip as a spiritual event. Eren Yeager: Destiny 4, the Builder. Eren Jaeger: Destiny 7, the Seeker. The Heart's Desire — 3 in both, because the vowels barely move — stays put, exactly as Zoro's 4 stayed put, and for exactly the same boring reason.

Two romanizations of one boy. Two destinies. He does the same things in both, and the number has opinions about the letters.

The Close

There is a version of this essay that is smug about Engrish, and it would be the stupid version. "Attack on Titan" is not a mistake a Japanese author was too unsophisticated to avoid. It is a design choice, made by someone using English the way English-speaking designers use kanji they cannot read: for the shape of it. The difference is that Isayama's t-shirt turned out to have the ending printed on it.

What I keep turning over is the nerve of the thing. The most-watched manga of its generation put its central twist on the cover of volume one, in English, where every reader on earth could see it — and the twist survived nine years, protected in the English-speaking world by nothing but the fact that the title was too broken to read.

The Japanese title hid a proper noun behind a grammatical particle. The English title hid it behind not being grammatical at all. Both worked. Only one of them was trying.