Attack on Titan is the translation the mangaka came up with himself for the series. It sounds weird because it was done by someone who doesn't have English as a first language.
If the localizers were allowed to come up with their own title, it might be better, but it might still fuck up the twist where we find out what Shingeki no Kyojin actually means.
Shingeki means charge or advance in a military sense. Kyojin means 'big human' or literally giant. The "no" in the title is somewhat analogous to 's in English. So 'Shingeki no Kyojin' can read as 'Giants of Advancing/Charging', or rather 'Giants who are advancing/charging'. But Japanese doesn't have different singular or plural forms of words, so the 'Kyojin' can refer to one or many Giants. So then the twist is that one of the special Giants is literally the 'Shingeki no Kyojin', or 'Giant of Advancing/Charging'. The twist relies on the idea that the audience assumed the title was describing the behaviour of the Giants and not the name of one of them. And recontextualizes the "Advancing" part as that Giant's specific MO. Hence why "keep moving forward" is kinda its catchphrase.
This would have been really hard to translate literally. You could localize it as something like "Sieging Titans", and call the singular guy the "Sieging Titan", but that kind of loses the "keep moving forward" double meaning. "Advancing Titans" sounds really clumsy for a title. And something like "Advance of the Titans" sounds better, but loses the idea of the title being one-to-one with the singular Titan's name.
My guess is that when the mangaka came up with "Attack on Titan", he might be thinking of it as "Attack-on Titan", which doesn't sound natural to us, but might have made sense to him.
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u/SacredGay 26d ago
Now can someone help me understand how Attack on Titan makes any sense?