Ah, the story of Demara. I read about him in the book "The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It... Every Time" by Maria Konnikova [1]. Recommended read.
My interest isn't so much becoming a great imposter; it is rather how to defend myself and my loved ones against cons. Ie. how to recognize them.
A fiction series about con men which I appreciated is Sneaky Pete [2] and the Spanish series La Casa De Papel (Money Heist) [3]
In Spain it's a fun meme how most foreign movie titles were translated into spanish, totally changing the meaning or simply destroying the original intent of the name.
You could argue some clever titles are not easy to translate, but God knows there was no need to translate "Die Hard" to "Jungla de cristal" (glass jungle). That practice was more prevalent 10-20 years ago, though.
The thing is that now, for one, it happened the other way around with ehm... "Money Heist" what a boring and uninspired name! :-)
Yeah, that happens all the time. I'm Dutch native (hence familiar with Dutch title getting translated), and I refer in my own language to La Casa De Papel with the Spanish title. I only used the English title because people here might recognize or use that term in applications such as Netflix. I understand enough Spanish to understand the Spanish title and I very much prefer native titles over translations but I do like it when behind it an understandable translation is added (even if it isn't perfect).
I keep a log (plain text file, using Vim to edit it) of all movies and series I've seen in my life. The way my log works:
Dutch -> remains Dutch as it is my primary native language.
English -> remains English as I understand it well enough.
All other -> Orig. title (English translation, regardless of how well I speak or understand the language).
If I were to start over I'd do it properly with a CSV database or Excel but yeah I didn't and merging 1500 lines I CBA.
I guess the only way is doing your due diligence on new important people. Check out their references. Lots of work and potentially embarrassing if you’re found out though..
You could argue some clever titles are not easy to translate, but God knows there was no need to translate "Die Hard" to "Jungla de cristal" (glass jungle). That practice was more prevalent 10-20 years ago, though.
The thing is that now, for one, it happened the other way around with ehm... "Money Heist" what a boring and uninspired name! :-)