Reflections On The Translation Of English Movie Titles

With the further development of China's reform and opening-up, communication between China and the rest of the world, especially with the English-speaking countries, many English movies swarmed into China's movie market. Needless to say,translation is supposed to play a key role in the introduction of these movies, which has consequently given rise to the study of their translation. The past twenty to thirty years saw great development in the field of movie translation. Many translation theorists and practitioners have studied to delve into movie translation problems and most of their work dealt with the title translation. However, a close examination of their articles will lead us to believe that the articles fall into two categories. Some are just kind of empirical summing-up of their authors or other translation practitioners or theorists, which, because of lack of theoretical support, causes questions of one kind or another to prop up in the translating process. The rest of these articles attempted to approach the problems from a theoretical perspective. However, all of these discussions resorted to the support of one single theory, with different authors proposing different ideas, and thus did not agree with each other.Consequently, there appeared many problems in the field of movie translation. One of them which have been long standing in the field is that different people advance different translations of a movie title which compete with each other for prominence. This immediately causes misunderstanding for audience who do not know English or who are English users but do not know the original title in advance, resulting in their blind choice of watching movies, which,speaking from the purpose of movie translation, leads to a negative effect on the movie's box office, and, in a deeper sense, on cross-cultural communication.According to Nida, the world-renowned linguist, translator and translation theorist, translation should make the readers of a translated text able to comprehend it to the point that they can conceive of how the original readers of the text must have understood and appreciated it or able to understand and appreciate it in essentially the same manner as the original readers did. Therefore, the present paper proposes that a successful movie title translation shall convey its intended functions. When translating a movie title, an analysis...