A Study Of English Movie Titles And Their Chinese Versions From The Perspective Of Metaphor And Functional Equivalence

With the deepening of the contacts between China and the foreign countries, more and more foreign movies are introduced into the Chinese cultural market; some classic foreign movies have left deep impressions to Chinese audience. As a special artistic form, movies not only promote cultural exchanges, but also produce economic benefits. The title is one of the most important elements of a movie, which reflects the film’s main content, emotional tone and main idea, etc. Meanwhile it has to be artistic and is able to attract the attention of the audience. The inappropriate translation of the movie title will distort the meaning of the original text, mislead the audience and affect the result of the box office, sometimes even blocks the cultural exchange. So far there have been a lot of researches on movie title translations both at home and abroad, but they mostly focus on pure translation views and cultural differences, few are studied from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.George Lakoff and Mark Johnson creatively propose the theory of Conceptual Metaphor, providing a new direction for the study of cognitive linguistics. In this thesis, the author first introduces the situation of metaphor study and the studies on movie title translations. Then the conceptual metaphor theory and functional equivalence theory are used to form the theoretical framework of this study. This research studies the English and Chinese titles of Oscar’s best-pictures through quantitative and qualitative analysis. Both versions of the titles are classified according to the metaphor categories and naming methods. The author calculates the frequency of each classification in both the English and Chinese titles. The result indicates that, both versions mostly adopts ontological metaphor and character naming, but the Chinese translations adopts more structural metaphor and theme naming than the English versions. After further analyses, the author finds out the reasons, which include different language habits, cultural backgrounds, and cognitive modes, etc. This study also discusses the translation rationality for metaphor connotations of the titles by using Nida’s functional equivalence theory. It is noticed that most of the Chinese translations can achieve functional equivalence, and the nonequivalent translations are mostly accepted by the audience, too. The author also points out the rationality of the weak version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with some statistic data. Lastly the author summarizes some principles and suggestions for the translation of English movie titles and their metaphor connotations.