Exploring The Film Title Translation From English Into Chinese

This present paper sets out to explore the film title translation from English into Chinese with an attempt to lay down some ground rules to pilot film title translation. The past two or three decades have witnessed vast development in film translation. However, being a special and significant part of translation, film translation is an area that is far from being explored. Few monographs at home and abroad have discussed this topic. Just a few chapters can be found touching upon this issue, hi the foreign language master journals published in the past decade, it is noticed that there is a relative paucity of theoretical writing on film translation in general and on film title translation in particular. Actually, film title translation is important and creative work. An excellent version may contribute a lot to the charm of the film and plays an important part in the introduction of a new film. Nevertheless, up to now no one has offered a systematic and feasible principle to pilot film title translation. Actually, film title translation is very problematic in that it is in the grip of a state of disunity. And now, it is high time that film title translation should be given due attention to in the present field of translation studies.Reception Aesthetics, a newly developed discipline, is adopted as the theoretical background of this thesis and an audience-oriented E-C film title translation approach is highly advocated. According to Reception Aesthetics, the historical life of a literary work is unthinkable without the active participation of the readers. The reception process is a kind of aesthetic experience; accordingly the aesthetic significance of a literary work can not be fully realized without the reader's reception. What's more, all works are read against some horizon of expectation, which should not be conceived in terms of a fixed or closed standpoint. The process of understanding is a process of fusing one's present horizon with apast horizon. In addition, literary reception has two patterns: the vertical reception and horizontal reception. They cover the entire depth as well as width of reception.Reception Aesthetics provides us with a new perspective of the relationship between film and its audience. The translator should bear the implied audience in mind, take their aesthetic tastes, aesthetic judgment, pre-understanding, psychological needs and horizon of expectation into full consideration and attach great value to their receptivity whenever he sets his pen to paper. However, it does not follow that the audience is God, which is proposed from the perspective of philistine sociology and is unquestioningly one-sided. Meanwhile, functional equivalence is called in question by indicating that functional equivalence works beautifully sometimes, but it can never be a universal criterion to go by in the process of the E-C film title translation.Exploring the sources, types, functions and styles of film titles, within the framework of audience-oriented approach, this paper introduces four basic points, namely the informative value, the cultural value, the aesthetic value and the commercial value, and tries to generalize five translation methods with rich examples, which are transliteration, literal translation, free translation, combination of literal translation and free translation, and adaptation. Based on the foregoing illustration, the introductory principle of trinity is offered, the maxim of conciseness, the maxim of appropriateness and the maxim of creation included. Finally, the present paper involves a two-dimensional comparison of film title translation from synchronic and diachronic perspective. It is hold that in different times, people have different horizon of expectation, different cultural and educational level, different aesthetic judgment and tastes, different cognition and reception level, therefore film title translation bears the imprint of times. Furthermore, on the basis of the comparison of English-Chinese film title translation hi the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan,...