Problematic translations of book titles

There is a world of difference between "A Christian view of science" and "The Christian view of science." The latter implies that there is only one possible view. However, publishers love The rather than A in book titles.

It turns out that translators do too. In Territories of Science and Religion, Peter Harrison discussed how the translated title of John Calvin's most influential work changed with time, reflecting underlying shifts in views about what Christianity was. 

unlike English, Latin has no article—no “a” or “the.” Accordingly, when rendering expressions such as “vera religion” or “christiana religio” into English, translators had to decide on the basis of context whether to add an article or not. As we have seen, such decisions can make a crucial difference, for the connotations of “true religion” and “christian religion” are rather different from those of “the true religion” and “the Christian religion.” The former can mean something like “genuine piety” and “Christlike piety” and are thus consistent with the idea of religion as an interior quality. Addition of the definite article, however, is suggestive of a system of belief.

 The translation history of Protestant Reformer John Calvin’s classic Institutio Christianae Religionis (1536) gives a good indication both of the importance of the definite article and of changing understandings of religion in the seventeenth century. Calvin’s work was intended as a manual for the inculcation of Christian piety, although this fact is disguised by the modern practice of rendering the title in English as The Institutes of the Christian Religion. The title page of the first English edition by Thomas Norton bears the more faithful “The Institution of Christian religion” (1561). The definite article is placed before “Christian” in the 1762 Glasgow edition: “The Institution of the Christian religion.” And the now familiar “Institutes” appears for the first time in John Allen’s 1813 edition: “The Institutes of the Christian religion.” 

The modern rendering is suggestive of an entity “the Christian religion” that is constituted by its propositional contents—“the institutes.” These connotations were completely absent from the original title. Calvin himself confirms this by declaring in the preface his intention “to furnish a kind of rudiments, by which those who feel some interest in religion might be trained to true godliness.”

Problematic translations of book titles continue today. Here are more examples.

"The Presence of the Kingdom'' is a wonderful book by Jacques Ellul. The title of the original French edition was Présence au monde moderne: Problèmes de la civilisation post-chrétienne. The literal translation is "Presence in the Modern World: Problems of Post-Christian Civilization''. I wonder if something is being lost in the English title.

A similar concern applies to Ellul's book, La Technique. The English edition has the title "The Technological Society.''
L.M. Sacasas states

Ellul defined Technique (la technique) as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” It was an expansive term meant to describe far more than what we ordinarily think of as technology, even when we use that term in the widest sense.

In the next two examples, the English titles are not problematic but have a different sense from the original German. The first took away something, and the second added something.

In 1955, Hans Urs von Balthasar  published Das Betrachtende Gebet, "Contemplative Prayer"). The English edition has the title Prayer.

The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, had the title Nachfolge, which translates literally as "succession" or "following".