Cultural Optimal Relevance Construction In E-C Translation Of Film Titles

Along with the extension of cultural exchanges all over the world,English and Chinese films are increasingly penetrating into each other's market,which makes film translation much more important.However,film translation is not an easy job because of cross-cultural barriers,especially film title translation.Though there are abundant academic studies about film title translation,few of them concentrated on discussion of cross-cultural barriers.What's more,up to now,there exists no theoretical description of the cognitive experience translators go through in film title translation. Thus,the author decided to conduct a detailed and deep study of film title translation from these two aspects.First,this thesis analyzes cross-cultural barriers which pose a great challenge to optimal relevance reconstruction in the target language.After the data analysis,the author comes to the conclusion that cross-cultural barriers in film title translation are mainly caused by allusions,idioms,slang and words with cultural connotations. Second,this thesis explains in detail the cognitive experience of translators from the perspective of relevance theory during film title translation,which can be said goes through three stages:first,searching for the optimal-relevant(speaker-intended) context;second,searching for the relevance(optimal relevance)between the optimal-relevant context and the original film title;third,reconstructing that relevance in the target language with the production of a translation.Two general guiding principles are proposed to instruct the performance of translators at the third stage.A film title is employed as an example to show the whole cognitive experience and those two general guiding principle are used to testify whether its existent translated versions meet the requirements of relevance theory.Third,in consistence with the two general principles,some translating strategies are proposed to overcome cross-cultural barriers.At last,based on the theory proposed by Gutt that translations should resemble the original in those respects that can be expected to make it adequately relevant to the receptor language audience,the author tries to make a little contribution by making it concrete what'those respects'are referring to in film title translation and sets it as an evaluating standard to determine the quality of translations.