A Study On Film Title Translation From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

Film is a special popular form of art which has both artistic and commercial values,combining audio and visual senses, widely loved by people all over the world. Film canreflects reality and fantasy. The film has developed for more than a century, and has becomeone of the most influential mass media. Since the reform and opening up policy, thetranslation of film has been flourishing in China. Film titles translation is a significant andspecial part of film translation. There are a lot of articles discussing about translation theory,however, film title translation is involved in few of them. In fact, problems are as follow: first,one identical film has several translations and poor quality translations exist, which leads tothe market disorder; second, the academic researches of English film title translation mainlyfocus on the translation strategies such as literal and liberal translations, which limits theresearch to linguistic level. Although a title is just one word or few words in most of the cases,it is the first sight of a film. An attractive film title will bring a great number of people to thecinema, on the contrary, a common or an improper film title will not arouse any interest of theaudience. An attractive and proper translation will successfully popularize the film whilepromoting cultural communication.This thesis mainly discusses the film title translation under the guidance of functionalequivalence theory. Equivalence principle is often adopted in the film title translation. Byequivalence principle, translators are trying to achieve functional equivalence, in other words,translators try to make the receptors of translated text understand and appreciate the translatedtext in the same way the original receptors understood and appreciated the text. Translationmethods such as transliteration, creation, addition and deletion are applied. No matter whatkind of technique is adopted, a good film title translation is always evaluated by theequivalence, in other words, the original reader’s response towards the original text should besimilar to the target reader’s response towards the target text.