retitle

Retitle is the act of giving a work a new title, either replacing the original or serving as an alternate. Retitling occurs in publishing, film and television, libraries, and digital media, and is often motivated by marketing, localization, cultural adaptation, or legal or rights considerations. A title change may aim to improve clarity, appeal, or discoverability across languages and markets.

In publishing and literature, works are retitled when marketed to different regions or reissued; the original title might be kept as a subtitle or retained in catalogs as an alternate title. In film and television, titles are often altered for international releases, to avoid confusion with other works, or to better capture the tone for a target audience.

In libraries and bibliographic work, retitling is part of cataloging; records may link the original title with the new one and may record both as alternate titles. Metadata standards such as MARC provide fields for access points and alternate titles; this helps users locate the work regardless of which title they know.

In digital media and file management, retitling can involve renaming files or updating metadata, with attention to preserving provenance and version history.

Ethical and legal considerations: changes should respect authorship and rights; obvious misrepresentation or misleading retitling can confuse citations; best practices include documenting the change, maintaining an archival record of the original title, and linking the two forms in catalogs and metadata.