A Multi-Perspective Approach To English-Chinese Translation Of Film Titles

The film is an audio-visual art integrating culture and commercialization.In recent decades,with the frequent cultural exchanges between China and the western world,more and more English films enter(legally or illegally) the Chinese market and reach huge audiences.In this process,the translation of films is necessarily indispensable.The title is the first image that a film presents to its audience.An effective and feasible translation of film titles can contribute both to the enjoyment of the audience and to the triumph of the box-office.As pointed out by Schaffner,both source text and target text fulfill a specific function and play a specific role in their respective language communities and cultures.The source text was produced in a source culture,it is a product of this culture(which is itself heterogeneous),and it functioned in that culture.The target text has to function in a new culture.The film title serves at least four essential functions namely informative function,expressive function,aesthetic function,and vocative function.The core of the informative function is the facts of a topic and reality outside language.It is supposed to shed light on the message of the film,to give hints at what is going on in the story,thus to help the audience to understand the film more readily.The expressive function is to please the organ of perception,or sense by its phonetic beauty,semantic beauty,imaginational beauty and graphic beauty.The rhythm,balance,sound effects,color words and rhetorical devices involved all contribute to adding artistic appeal to the film title.The aesthetic function endows the title with uniqueness that pleases the sense and provides artistic enjoyment.Film titles with aesthetic function please the feelings of audience through their unevenness in intonation,smoothness in sound and vividness in image presentation.The vocative function means that the film title should arouse people's interest and persuade them to see the film.It may also be in good equivalence with its commercial function. Some other aspects of the film and the film title will also be reviewed,including film genres,naming approaches of English film titles and the features of film titles. These various respects of films are intended to give a profuse picture to the readers of this thesis,and prepare them for the theoretical analysis on this matter.Despite the importance of film title translation in the whole industry,the present state of E-C film title translation is far from satisfactory.It has not been adequately researched.Existing problems such as mistranslation,lack of regulation and presence of different versions of one English film title side by side may have been perceived, but are not given due attention.One reason for this chaotic condition is that theoretical construction of E-C film title translation has not been well established.Translation theories are not at all insufficient.The question is how to domesticate them.Most researchers rely on one theory,and explore the issue from one perspective.It proves to be infeasible in bringing out a satisfactory version.The present thesis attempts to probe into the issue from multiple perspectives.It builds its analysis on four seemingly separate but interrelated theories,which are Nida's Functional Equivalence,Skopos Theory which is helpful for conveying the informative function of film titles,Reception Aesthetics which is useful for conveying the aesthetic function of film titles and Newmark's Communicative Translation Theory.Nevertheless,we should not be content with and stop at only theoretical illustration.What's more important is to bring theory into practice.Therefore,the author goes on to demonstrate the already popularized and widely applied translation techniques and methods.To be exact,they are transliteration,literal translation,free translation and creative translation.Under free translation,there are such techniques as reduction,addition,conversion,transposition and adaptation.It's up to the translator to decide on the priority of the translation ingredients and the translation approaches,with a view to optimal effect.Based on the review of relative theories,practical techniques and methods used in translation,the author deems that to achieve the best translation of a film title,it is best to see whether it has fulfilled the functions of film titles to the optimal effect. Then the author attempts to put forward her tentative solution to the issue in discussion,that is,the principle of"Maximum of Adequacy",which is intended to serve as a guiding principle for the process of film title translation.It is expected to see how much of the function the TL versions have achieved.It advocates that when we are engaged in film title translation,we should try to make our version the most relative to the original version,and make it adequately fulfill its functions to the maximum.To specify the principle,three dimensions of adequacy namely Informative Adequacy,Aesthetic Adequacy and Cultural Re-construction Adequacy will be illustrated.This thesis aims to work out a more satisfying solution to the chaotic condition of translation of English film titles so as to make some contributions to the theoretical construction.It is reckoned by the author that a practical guiding principle should be established to serve as the reference for the process of the translation of English film titles.To approach the issue,the author adopts a multi-perspective view,and several interacting theories are to be involved to provide their support respectively.A vast number of already translated film titles are to be cited to help facilitate the explanation.