A Study Of Chinese Translation Of English Film Titles From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

With more and more English films’ appearance in the Chinese market, films have becomeone of the most important media for cross-cultural communication. The title, as the movie’s faceand label, is always put in the eye-catching place to attract the audience’s eyeballs at the firstsight. Therefore, the study of film title translation should be attached great importance to.However, the rendition of film titles (FT for an abbreviation) is far from easy and toilless, it’sreally a complicated and problematic task. Until now, due to various reasons, few have offered asystematic principle to guide the film title translation, which results in many problems in theprocess of film title translation (FTT for an abbreviation), such as mistranslation, looseregulation, many versions for one film, only a few good translations, etc.. And as for thetranslation research, few essays are written concerning the translation of films, let alone filmtitles; if there exist some, they are mainly conducted from the perspectives of Functionalism,Skopos theory, Contextual Adaption as well as Cross-Cultural Communication, or onlypractically focus on the translation strategies and methods. Few analyzed the film translationfrom a macro-scopic angle nor proposed the systematic principle and method to guide the filmtitle rendering. Based on this, this paper tries to conduct some tentative research of FTT underthe guidance of the “three-dimensional principle” of the Eco-translatology Theory.Eco-translatology is a newly established and persuasive theory proposed by Professor HuGengshen, which is developed from the theory of Translation as Adaptation and Selection.Compared to the previous theories, it offers a macroscopic and systematic perspective to thetranslation study and can be broadly applied to FTT as a different angle and new starting point.According to Professor Hu, Eco-translatology is “an ecological approach to the translationstudies” or “translation studies from the ecological perspective”, which takes the basic principlesof Darwin’s Biological Evolution as its cornerstones, such as “natural selection”,“survival ofthe fittest”, etc. In other words, Eco-translatology focuses on the integrity of the translationaleecosystem, and offers new descriptions and explanations to the translation essence, process,principles, methods and so on, as for the translation essence, translation is the translators’selective activity of their adaption to the Eco-environment; translation process is an alternativecycle of translators’ adaption and selection; translation should conform to the principle of“selective adaptation and adaptive selection” and be transformed from three dimensions, namelylinguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions.The thesis is composed of five parts. Part one provides the background information of thethesis, the research significance and the layout of the paper. In part two, the thesis sets out topresent the profile of English film titles, including film genres, naming approaches and present studies on film title translation in China, which can help a translator to acquire the basicknowledge of film title translation. Part three introduces Eco-translatology, the theory to beadopted for the analysis. This part includes the basic connotation of Eco-translatology, thetheoretical study of Eco-translatology and the applicability of Eco-translatology to FTT. Part four,as the core of the thesis, goes on to apply the Eco-translatology to FTT, which concerns twoaspects in correspondence with the mentioned theory. The first is translational Eco-environmentof FTT. The concept of the translational Eco-environment is far broader than what the “context”refers to in the traditional explanation, which is the interactive and interrelated whole composedof language, culture, communication, society, author, reader, client, etc. In the present thesis, theauthor probes into the Eco-environment of FTT from the features (linguistic, cultural, aestheticand commercial features) and functions (informative, aesthetic, commercial functions) of bothEnglish and Chinese film titles, which are undoubtedly the essential factors in the translationalEco-environment influencing the translation process. The second aspect is the adaptivetransformation from three dimensions. The thesis makes an attempt to elaborate and illustrate thetranslation of English film titles under the three-dimensional principles, that is from theperspective of linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions. Part five summarizes the maincontent and the limitations of the paper.