Exploration Of The Problems In English Film Title Translation

Based on Peter Newmark's text typology theory within the communicative and semantic translation theory framework, this paper discusses the current problems in the translation of English film titles and accordingly proposes some tentative solutions. According to Peter Newmark in his A Textbook of Translation, he separates a text into three categories according to their different functions: namely, informative, expressive and vocative. Newmark believes it is the text type that decides the approach and method to be employed in the process of translation. This paper starts from the introduction of communicative and semantic translation and text typology in particular, and analyzes systematically the problems of various types in the translation of English film titles and puts forward the possible solutions.This paper consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, it gives a general account of the types, features and functions of English film titles in order to inform the readers of the general knowledge of English film titles. Then the previous researches on this subject and their limitations are discussed. In Chapter two, the paper gives an introduction of Peter Newmark's Semantic translation and Communicative translation theory. Application of ST and CT to different types of texts is also presented. Chapter three and four are the main body of the paper. In chapter three, the author discusses various problems in the translation of English film titles according to different film types. In chapter four the author proposes some tentative solutions to the translation problems, i.e. how to realize the various functions of the film titles.