A Study Of English Film Title Translation-From The Perspective Of Context Adaptation

Recently, with the continuous enrichment and improvement of people's spiritual and material life, seeing a film has gradually become a popular entertainment to people. At present, large amount of big movies from Europe and the United States, especially Hollywood films keep gushing into the domestic market; at the same time, the outstanding domestic films also win public praise in the international market. A good film reflects the reality of the society and introduces abundant information of different culture, so it usually impresses the audience. While a good title is usually required to provide the information about a film, please audience with aesthetic enjoyment, and more importantly, it should evoke the people's desire to see the film by adapting their mental world. So an excellent title greatly enhances the film and makes it more memorable for people.In the past decades, great progress on the study of English film title translation has been made. With a consideration to the special and significant position of film title translation in translation field, it is far from being sufficiently explored in this field. There is lack of feasible process and framework to guide English film title translation up to now, even though there are few monographs discussing this topic at home and abroad and only a few chapters have touched upon this issue.The adaptation theory proposed by Jef Verschueren (2000) provides a new perspective for the study of film title translation. On the one hand, the thesis develops the discussion about the contextual correlates of adaptability under the guidance of context adaptation and social world and mental world are also taken as a starting point to discuss how to meet the communicative needs of a translator. On the other hand, the author analyzes the influence of the aesthetic and vocative functions of language proposed by Newmark (2001) on mental world. In Jef Verschueren (2000), culture is an important element of social world and exerts its significant influence on people's thought, actions and language. The thesis discusses film title translation from the perspective of context adaptation with a combination of aesthetics, emotions and culture. And a further research on how to evoke the audience desire to see the film by adapting to their mental state is elaborated.A framework is constructed to pilot English film title translation from the perspective of context adaptation. Its advantages are listed as follows:(i) This framework follows the similar process and three stages (comprehending the source text, expressing in target language, checking up translated text);(ii) It highlights the communicative needs of a translator; (iii) A comprehensive consideration of the translated versions is emphasized with a combination of aesthetics, emotions and culture.So, a clever translated version given by the translator can contribute to attracting people to the cinema for seeing the film, and this title may maximize the film's commercial value.The thesis points out that an excellent translated version of film title is presented by adapting communicative context, whereas whether or not the audiences are persuaded to see the film depends on a successful adaptation to the audiences' mental states. Lastly, the framework is applied to guide the translation practices of new film titles by author, and some better results are achieved. In summary, the framework provides a support for film title translation and its validity is proved by practical examples.