Abstract:
Film title translation (FTT), as an essential part of film translation, is a kind of important, creative, and challenging work. But not enough emphasis is laid on the value of English-Chinese FTT, neither is enough theory research. In addition, low awareness of intercultural differences, the lack of unified supervision and the excessive pursuit of commercial profit, all the above reasons caused a lot mistranslation of film titles. The paper aims to analyze this issue with plentiful examples, and puts forward three basic translation principles, namely cultural constructive, aesthetic and commercial principles. Besides, the author also comes up with five translation strategies, namely literal translation, free translation, transliteration, explication and adaptation. With these ways, the mistranslation of film titles from English to Chinese should be avoided as much as possible. Then it comes to the conclusion that the best means and final goal of FTT is “targeted audience-orientation”.
Key words: Film titles; Mistranslation; Translation principles; Translation strategies
摘 要：
电影片名翻译，作为电影翻译的一个必要组成部分，是一项重要而富有创造性的工作。但是英语电影片名翻译的价值未受到足够重视，针对它的理论探讨远远不够。此外，由于对不同文化异同的认识不足，统一监管的缺乏和对商业利润的过分追求，以上这几种原因导致了电影片名的误译。本文旨在列举大量的实例来略论这个问题，并提出了三个基本翻译准则，分别是文化构造，审美和商业准则。除此之外，作者还提出了五个翻译策略，即直译，英语论文题目，英语毕业论文，意译，音译，释译以及编译。通过以上的措施，本文可以解决英文电影片名的误译问题。最后，最后得出结论，即电影片名翻译最有效的措施以及最终目的就是以观众为取向。
关键词：电影片名；误译；翻译准则；翻译策略
1 Introduction
Movies are a very important part of intercultural communication. Their title translation, as an essential part of film translation, is an important, creative and challenging work. And it’s a special field with distinctive features in translation studies.
To make the titles more impressive, people usually use many rhetoric devices in the translation of film titles, such as simile, metaphor, and oxymoron. The features of film title translation are reflected on the aspects of the titles’ form, style, aesthetic and modes of thinking. Different features themselves characterize the film titles. They are simple and coherent with sporadic lengthy titles in view.
Film titles always give audience a general impression about the genre of a movie, and so, are believed to be one of the most influential factors affecting the box office, that is why producers always take film titling serious. Nowadays, the quality of film title translation is considered more significant as more movies are released internationally under the effect of globalization .So how to translate the film titles and how to make the translation attractive to the audience so as to improve its box office become a question during translation. |
