One thing I can't get my head around in Bollywood films is all that swapping between Hindi and English (do people really do that in India?). Breaking into English seems to happen for a few reasons: speaking to English people; indicating social class; characters giving it a bit of attitude; for gratuitous dramatic emphasis. The last three apply (often simultaneously) in the preppy new comedy Student of the Year, about the lengths ridiculously chiselled students go to get ahead at the ridiculously chipper St Theresa's high school, where English is obviously part of the heritage. But one usage in the film stands out: the title.

Having an English title is a sign that a film, like the students, has aspirations. I'm always amazed that so few Bollywood films translate their titles when they're distributed abroad – this tiny, simple tweak could do so much to extend their reach beyond Hindi speakers. The studios bother to subtitle their films for export – presumably for second-generation immigrants with a shaky grasp of the mother tongue, and curious foreigners – so why not extend the effort to some of the overall marketing as well? Student of the Year is a typical 21st-century Bollywood blockbuster, its weave from the same garish MTV-borrowed pattern that is part of youth culture everywhere now. The title seems like a pretty good place to advertise that.

But barely any take that first step. A weird resignation has settled that non-Indian audiences aren't fundamentally interested: in the UK at least, Bollywood films are rarely screened to the mainstream press, so they don't get reviewed much. Our critic Peter Bradshaw informs me that dominant distributor Eros International stopped press screening several years ago, because film prints often arrive in the UK almost on the day of release: "I don't think reviews made any difference to their business model!"

Of course the 25 million-strong worldwide Indian diaspora is the priority. Every article I've written about Bollywood always draws comments on how its cinema is too culturally alien to appeal to anyone else: too long, too repetitive, and, yes, all those bloody songs. But that gap will never be bridged in the west, or a market created for the more culturally digestible films that Bollywood has to offer, without some basic overtures – such as allowing people to understand at a glance what a film is about. I'm convinced the crossover market is there, with today's audiences better travelled and more ethnically mixed. Subtitles aren't the dealbreaker they once were: 49 such films crossed the £1m mark in Britain in the noughties, where that figure was nine in the 90s.

After all, it's the big Indian players who have talked in recent years about the way forward for Bollywood: that it needs to turn its attention to the global mainstream, and Hollywood's stranglehold over it. There have been the occasional mild breakouts, such as 3 Idiots ($72m worldwide) and My Name Is Khan ($42m), and the odd gimmicky come-on to the international scene, such as Reliance Entertainment getting Brett Ratner to re-cut Kites, in 2009, into a shorter version.

But it strikes me that, just by marketing its regular output more directly, Bollywood could quietly achieve much higher visibility day-by-day. Even with the 150-minute runtime, the irrepressible urge for manufactured song-and-dance, the full pony-show, Student of the Year still has a basic daffy exuberance that, with a Hollywood-scale marketing budget, can cross cultural boundaries: the Indian Glee, maybe? (I'm spitballing here.) That kind of marketplace muscle is all Bollywood's globally streamlined breed is lacking now: last year's Goa crime thriller Dum Maaro Dum, and this year's Kahaani, with Vidya Balan as a pregnant software engineer leading the audience on a Usual Suspects-style dance, were as multiplex-ready as anything from Hollywood.

There's still the matter of the titles, of course (Dum Maaro Dum=Take a Shot; Kahaani=Story). I can understand why Bollywood is reluctant to translate: it might dilute the impact of its existing marketing and alienate the Hindi-speaking faithful. But, set against the talk of becoming a global operator, that shows the true, half-metamorphosed state of where the Indian industry is now. Perhaps it needs to follow the plot of another recent release, English Vinglish, whose laddoo-making Maharashtra housewife decides, because of the mockery of her family, that it's time to take English classes. Unfortunately, first impressions do still count.

• Next week's After Hollywood will interview Nigerian trailblazer Kunle Afolayan. Meanwhile, what global box-office stories would you like to see covered in the column? Let us know in the comments below.