On English-Chinese Film Title Translation

Film now becomes an important part of modern life. Because of China's large-scale English film importation in recent years and the significance of film title in film, it is necessary to attach importance to English-Chinese (E-C) film title translation.However, in practice, there are many problems, such as market disorder, excessive translations for one film, and low quality of translations; at the same time, there are many differences in translation strategies and methods adopted by translators from the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In academic studies, the issue is always discussed from the perspective of literal and free translations, which limits the study to linguistic level, and the translation process and the evaluation criteria of E-C film title translation are never studied in details. This thesis argues that, under the guidance of the optimized foreignization, we can find objective ways to regard those phenomena and feasible methods to solve those problems.In this thesis, through the study of film's nature, its status in society and multi-functions of film title, the importance of conveying otherness in E-C film title translation is recognized and emphasized. By diachronic, synchronic and typal comparisons of translated titles, it concludes that otherness is accepted in different degrees in different times, places and types of films, through which the optimized foreignization in E-C film title translation is defined. And the thesis also explores how to follow out the guidance of the optimized foreignization in the translation process and the translation evaluation of E-C film title translation.