Nominalization In English Film Titles And English Translation Of Chinese Film Titles

Film title translation is an important and creative work.An excellent translated version can contribute a lot to the box-office of a new film.Therefore,the delicacy and efficiency of film title translation can not only transmit the subject and idea of a film appropriately,but also help obtain business profit.Although the past two or three decades has already witnessed a great production of articles or books dealing with film translation of various kinds and a large part of them are devoted to the title translation,a closer observation on those works will leads us to the fact that their focuses on film titles are invariably fell into the following three categories.Firstly, the study on film titles from cultural perspective,namely,to study the influences of cultural elements on the naming approaches or translating methods of film titles within different cultures;secondly,from the perspective of film contents,or,to differentiate the naming approaches according to the contents of the film and apply to each genre a different translating method,some to be rendered literally while others non-literally;and finally,from the theoretical perspective,that is to say,to work out a general guideline of the translation principle such as whether we should adopt Foreignization principle or the principle of Domestication,or on the standard such as whether to treat film title translation as that of advertisement or literature.Their efforts on the guidance of film title translation surely have contributed a lot to the explanation for some successful translated versions,however,there is still an important part about film title study remains unnoticed:the high frequency of nominalization appearing in English film titles and the tendency of verb-centered expressions in the Chinese ones,which,to the author's belief,shall be a big vacancy to be explored with regard to the overall translation rules,and the study from this perspective shall bring about a more practical guideline for film title translation.Therefore,in the present paper,a comparison of the linguistic characteristics between English and Chinese film titles together with a discussion of potential causes behind these differences are presented at the beginning,during which,the tendency of noun-centered English expressions and verb-centered Chinese phrases are being pointed out.On the basis of this,the author goes deeper into the exploration of the rules and motivations behind the device of nominalization in English film titles,followed by a detailed analysis on the English translation of Chinese film titles under the framework of M.A.K.Halliday's theory of Grammatical Metaphor,particularly that of Nominalization,in order to provide from a functionalist approach a theoretical and practical guidance to the application of nominalization device to the naming of English film titles and the translation of Chinese ones, with a further view to intrigue more studies on the subject and to promote more Chinese films into the international cultural market.