English-Chinese Movie Title Translation

As increasingly more English movies are rushing into China, English-Chinese (E-C)movie title translation (MTT) is becoming an important aspect of the field of E-C translation.Although many successful translations have been produced, the quality of E-C movie titletranslation, however, is still in urgent need of improvement. Numerous studies haveconsequently been carried out regarding E-C MTT and have made obvious achievements.Many studies are however handicapped by a lack of systemic theoretical bases, methodologiesand authentic evidence and need to be compensated for by more holistic studies. Guided byJia Zhengchuan’s Dialectical Systemic Philosophy of Translation, mainly based on Germanfunctionalism, using well-known examples of E-C MTTs as examples, and employing anintegrated methodology combining analysis and synthesis, deduction and induction, this thesistherefore attempts to make a comprehensive study of E-C MTT so as to achieve aGerman-functionalism-based systemic understanding of the nature, features and rules of E-CMTT and establish a corresponding set of E-C MTT procedures and strategies applicable toand capable of optimizing E-C MTT practice.Theoretically, this thesis first proposes a German-functionalism-based systemicunderstanding of the nature, features and rules of E-C MTT: E-C MTT is a contextualizedpurposeful, communicative, artistic, inter-lingual, inter-social and inter-cultural text transferprocess, internally being composed nonlinearly of source text, target text, source text producer,translator, target text receiver and other components, externally being influenced by asituational and socio-cultural context and performing cognitive, artistic, linguistic,psychological, social, cultural and other functions, particularly the function of transferring theinformation and style of source movie title and arouse target movie title readers’ interest in themovie. E-C MTT is featured by dialectical interconnectedness in general, dialectical opennessexternally, dialectical integrity internally, and dialectical dynamicity temporally.Correspondingly, the rules of E-C MTT include the rules of overall interconnectedness, dialectical openness, dialectical integrity (including three sub-rules, i.e., Skopos rule,coherence rule, and fidelity rule), and dialectical dynamicity.Methodologically, this thesis puts forward a set of German-functionalism-based systemicprocedures and strategies for E-C MTT: E-C MTT should be carried out in four proceduresconsistent with the above four rules, i.e., the procedures of overall consideration, contextualanalysis, structural analysis, and process analysis. The strategies of E-C MTT arecomplementarily composed of documentary strategies (including interlinear translation, literaltranslation, philological translation, exoticizing translation) and instrumental strategies(including equi-functional translation, heterofunctional translation, and homologoustranslation).This thesis may possess both practical and theoretical significance to E-C MTT inparticular and to E-C translation in general. On the one hand, the German-functionalism-based systemic approach to E-C MTT proposed in it is directly applicable to E-C MTT andhas important implications to E-C translation as a whole. On the other hand, the proposedapproach also compensates for some of the drawbacks of the existing studies of E-C MTT inparticular and E-C translation in general.