Films "Made in England" have their titles changed for Europe because they are too hard. Hollywood movies make it easy.

Sometimes it is hard to recognise friends abroad. They take on new, foreign airs and dress differently. Thus Sense and Sensibility is ordinary enough under grey English skies but is transformed on crossing the Channel. In Germany it becomes Sinn und Sinnlichkeit which is fine, but it means Sense and Sensuality.

I had read a couple of hundred words in Le Monde about the star and scriptwriter of the film version, Emma Thompson, before it struck me what Raison et sentiments meant. It had the look of another fine title, possibly a work of Voltaire. The Italians follow the French model obediently and choose Ragione e sentimento, which is perfect for an Italian film. Only Spanish kept to the original with Sentido y sensibilidad.

European cultures struggle, and often fail, to absorb the multi-layered concepts born in other societies at other times. Much Ado About Nothing loses its soul when rendered as Beaucoup to bruit autour de rein. On the other hand, the famous line in one tongue can become the perfect cliché in another: Prague is littered with posters which read Byt ci nebyt or "To be or not to be". This shows sympathy with those who are wondering if they really should procure the best mail-order catalogue.

But why did Sense and Sensibility have to be translated when so many film titles are not? Highlander and Braveheart are supposedly set in a British time and space but remain with the original titles on posters and placards. The answer is that translated titles, words and phrases are British. The American titles are usually left in the original. When this is not so, they have no resonance in their new language.

American is the global lingua franca and everybody expects to understand it. Even the English. We all know what life-vests and bullet-proof vests are, and our television programmes routinely translate familiar objects into American.

So we hear of "licence plates" on getaway cars and guns being stowed in their "trunks". In recent days a cricketer has been described as a "pinch hitter", and the term "pointman" has invaded the vocabulary of sports journalists who are as ignorant as I about the meaning of such words.

It is the universality of American culture that means we understand it even when we don't know what it means. American culture can be absorbed into, say, France as easily as a Frenchman can become an American by donning a baseball cap at a ballgame. (But Americans, as Ronald Reagan pointed out, can never be accepted as French.)

England contains what is still a separate civilisation which others struggle to understand in their own terms. American is as universal as Latin was in Christendom. A 21st century Martin Luther, wearing a T-shirt inscribed in German, might one day spray graffiti on the gates of Deutsches-Disneyland at Wittenberg in some desperate gesture of cultural defiance.

Peter Krieg, of the Babelsburg film studios outside Berlin, was asked the other day on the radio about the "European film". He replied that it already existed and was to be found in Hollywood. Every European is at home with the icons of the movie. A French film shot in Paris is not European, it is French. Los Angeles is familiar in a way London or Lyon are not. So Krieg was going to make American-language films in Babelsburg. They would then be dubbed into German and thereby gain markets that a German film would be denied.

Sense and Sensibility is translated because it is English in style and conception, even though it was "made in America" by a Taiwanese director. A film like Braveheart, lacking any fundamental sense of time and place, has no complex cultural overtones and so remains untranslated across Europe.

A book called The American Exceptionalism shows how different the US is to everywhere else. Everything about it, the place of the Bible, the love of guns, is different. In spite of that, we all accept it as the home of the universal culture. Or maybe because of that.