Analysis Of Mistranslation Of Film Titles From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

With the accelerating pace of globalization, more and more outstanding foreign film works have been imported into China, and the importance of film translation is also increasingly exposed. The quality of title translations takes a leading role in the propaganda of the film in domestic market. Movie title is a high degree of generalization and induction for the content and theme of the film by use of the simple and concise words. Containing the rich content, it is the essence of the film work. In the past three decades, the research on film translation, especially the research on film title translation, has not been laid a corresponding emphasis. Therefore how to translate the titles is considered worth studying. Skopos Theory is an effective approach to movie title translation.Functionalist Skopos Theory emerged in the1970s in German. In Skopos Theory, the translation is a purposeful action guided by four principles, namely, the Skopos rule, the Coherence rule, the Fidelity rule plus the Loyalty principle. Most important of all, the translation is an intercultural action and it must be conducted in cultural contexts. Unlike traditional translation theories, translators have the freedom to choose the most appropriate translation strategy to fulfill the intended purposes of the target text, but they are not totally free. They are restricted by the Loyalty principle. The criterion of translation in this theory is adequacy rather than the traditional equivalence in form. There are four guiding principles of Skopos Theory. The skopos rules can be considered as the most significant one for translation. It demands that the translators should try to meet the purposes of the target text by all kinds of translation strategies. Thus another two rules, coherence rule (intra-textual coherence) and fidelity rule (inter-textual coherence) subordinate the Skopos rule. The coherence rule or the intra-textual rule stipulates that the target text should be meaningful for the receivers, conforming the receivers’ cultural situations. The inter-textual coherence is supposed to exist between source original and target text, while the coherence is in link to both the translation of the source text and the translation skopos. The above mentioned three rules of Skopos Theory overlap the whole process of translation and the loyalty principle as a complement to the three rules. Loyalty refers to the interpersonal relationship between the translator, the source-text sender, the target-text addressees and initiator.This paper hereby will explain the four functions in light of Buhler and Jacobson’s language function:the informative function, the cultural function, the aesthetic function as well as the commercial function with examples. The basic function of film titles is to provide useful information content for the audience. The film titles often take on a strong cultural atmosphere. Good film title translation should possess artistic feature, which can arouse resonation with the audience and pass the aesthetic information, causing the audience’s imagination and generating their desire to see the film. As regards the introduced films, the translated film titles advertise the film, directly making a decisive impact on box office. It is one of the crucial factors whether the film can get the commercial success in the overseas market. As is known, the English and Chinese language have huge differences in linguistic expressions, thinking manners, and cultural connotations and so on, and the same is true for English and Chinese film titles which possess their own characteristics respectively.A small corpus using100movie title translation instances is established for the study in this paper. There are four research methods involved in this part to analyze the language data, respectively qualitative and quantitative research, and universal and individual research as well. According to the analysis of the corpus, some findings have come out. With more and more frequent cultural exchanges between different countries, a large number of outstanding foreign films are introduced into domestic countries, but the movie title translation is far from perfection, and mistranslations for film titles spread widely. Generally, there are three kinds of mistranslations for movie titles by the analysis of the mistranslation instances corpus:namely, cultural misleading, titles formatting, and titles varied. The translation of film titles is the exchange between the two cultures. Because of the great differences in the history, geography and climate, political and economic values, customs and ethics, translators cannot fully understand the cultural, emotional connotation loaded by the original title, which is the main cause for mistranslation. There is still another phenomenon in the process of translating film titles, which is the excessive pursuit of series model of film titles, meanwhile there is a lack of a unified regulation in film industry, causing one film with several translated titles. Many western films have not yet been screened in the Mainland, but have been widely circulated on the network, and the translations are in a wide variety.With regard to the causes of mistranslation of film titles, three points have been mentioned in this paper. Firstly, translators are short of understanding of the cultural connotation; if the translator is unaware of or misunderstands the cultural connotation, it is likely to cause the title mistranslated. Mistranslation may be produced by the realization of misunderstanding of the cultural connotation of the original title. This requires translators to take the cultural connotation of the title into account, and reconstruct their cultural connotations in the target language. Secondly, the translated title information cannot be receivable for target audiences. Translators sometimes encounter the differences of national culture, which may be difficult to be recognized and accepted. Hence, the acceptability by the target audience should be paid attention to in the process of titles translation, in order to avoid generating the audience’s cultural misunderstanding. Lastly, the producers of the films excessively pursue benefit. For the sake of commercial interests, some of movie title translations make a trick, giving up principles to cater to the audience, so that the translation has nothing to do with the content of the film. In order to avoid film titles mistranslation, effective translation strategies should be accordingly employed on the basis of translation principles, such as transliteration, literal translation, free translation, creative translation, combination of transliteration and free translation, and combination of literal translation and free translation.