| Film, one of the most important mass media, is an audio-visual art. It creates images, narrates stories, expresses feelings, states philosophy and attracts the audience by its sound, color and moving pictures. Film is more direct and sensitive than any other form of art to keep pace with times. Ever since the adoption of the policy of reform and opening up to the outside world at the end of the 1970s, cultural exchanges have become increasingly prevalent and the receptors of dubbed films have greatly expanded. Meanwhile, people begin to investigate the films from various angles and comparison between films of different countries also starts to prosper. However, being a special and significant part of films, film titles are far from being explored and there is a relative paucity of writings on film title translation.Language and culture are two inseparable twins. Language is a reflection of culture and also part of culture. Culture regards language as one of its manifestation forms and exerts profound influence on language. To film titles, there is no exception. As part of language and the enlightening part of films that keeps up with times, film titles bear rich culture imprints. This paper adopts a cross-cultural perspective to explore film titles, analyzing the cultural factors reflected in film titles. Based on this analysis, the second half of this thesis sets out to explore the translation of film titles, aiming to lay down some practical rules for film title translation.This paper consists of six chapters, including the conclusion.As a starting point, the first chapter briefly discusses the motivation and objectives of choosing this topic. Then the definition of cross-cultural communication and inter-relations of language and culture are dealt with. It is pointed out that language and culture are intrinsically bound to each other. Any language can be seen as a sign system representing a particular culture as well as a part of it, and the meanings of any expressions refer directly or indirectly to the corresponding culture.Chapter Two is a profile of film titles. In this chapter, one of the most common ways of categorizing films is introduced and the subject of this study—titles of feature films are brought up. Four popular ways of film naming are then summarized with rich examples from both Chinese and American films: indication of plot, subject, theme and settings. The linguistic, aesthetic and cultural features born by film titles are explained in this chapter and at last the four functions of these titles are touched upon, that is, vocative function, informative function, expressive function and aesthetic function. The third chapter is an important part of this paper—analyzing the different cultural elements reflected in film titles. Here culture falls into three groups: material culture, institutional culture and psychological culture. Differences between Chinese and American cultures in each of these culture types are expounded with large numbers of examples given to demonstrate these discrepancies. Psychological cultural factors, which are the core of this analysis, are further divided into perception and values, and values of various kinds are then elaborated in detail. Aesthetical and commercial factors also play an important role in the naming of films, and therefore the two factors are also investigated in order to have an overall idea about the factors affecting film naming and set the stage for the translation of film titles. The above research is conducted from a static point of view and the last section of Chapter Three sets out to approach the influence of cultural factors from a dynamic perspective, that is, different times shape different time spirits and this kind of differences in time spirits can also be seen from film titles.Chapter Two and Three give a relatively thorough idea about film titles and the second half of the thesis, starting from Chapter Four, begins to look into film title translation. Translation is never an easy task, which is influenced by linguistic...
|
PDF Full Text Request