So I was at this translator site and you can type in something and it will translate it up to a max of 56 times. It comes up with some funny stuff, but when I typed in Resident Evil, it turned into Biohazard after being translated into Japanese and back again. Here's a pic:

Spoiler:

Does anyone know if this might be why Biohazard became Resident Evil? It's weird.

I get the same back-translation result in ImTranslator, too. Weird.

But then again, this is the Japanese we're dealing with here. They're a pretty weird people in general (no offense intended to anyone here who might be Japanese or part Japanese).

It might be because the same characters can mean different things. Same thing could be translated in various ways.

Now that you posted this, the name change starts to make a whole lotta sense.

It's just that everyone always debated why they named it Resident Evil. And no one seems to know why they chose that particular name. And then we come across this extremely simple reason lol.

One tends to miss the most obvious of reasons.

What should we do now that we have (kinda) answered this age old question?

Let the mystery live on.

I heard it had to do with something in the US being named Biohazard.

maybe resident evil was never a "term" in japan (and some other countries) until the name resident evil was used for US and Europe release... so maybe resident evil officially became biohazard in translation...

but still......

That might also be correct.

Ace might be right.

@Patronum: We all know that RE couldn't be named Biohazard in the US because there was already a band of the same name, but that's not the issue. We are wondering if Resident Evil in the Japanese language is Biohazard.