On Film Title Translation From The Memetic Perspective

Although a lot of scholars like He Ying (2001), Yue Feng (2001) and He Yuemin(1997) have studied the translation of film titles from Chinese to English and fromEnglish to Chinese from such perspectives as functional equivalence, adaptationtheory, relevance theory and skopos theory, only a few has proceeded from thememetic perspective to carry out any studies. As a result, this thesis intends to startwith the memetic perspective to probe into the translation of film titles betweenChinese and English languages in the hope of giving some inspirations to film titletranslators and making some contributions to cultural communication between Chinaand the Western countries.The memetic theory is an important theory of pragmatics and the transmissionmodes of memes are of significant inspiration to the translation of film titles. A sourcelanguage meme can only survive and widely spread in target culture by possessing thequalities of high copying-fidelity, fecundity and longevity of strong memes.Translating can be regarded as an activity of transmitting a meme from a sourcelanguage meme pool to the target language meme pool, and thus it is closely related tothe memetic theory. This thesis argues that the final objectives of film title translationlies in creating strong translated film title memes and attracting as many targetlanguage audiences as possible with the least of time. Consequently, it intends toprobe into the status quo of film title translation at home and abroad. By introducingsuch contents as the transmission mode of memes and the characteristics of strongmemes of the memetic theory, it studies the memetic phenomenon in film titletranslation and hopes to discover the common features of film titles and memes. Byanalysis of many English and Chinese film titles, it suggests the translators to refer tothe transmission modes of memes, namely, quotation and simulation, in combinationwith the existing translating methods such as literal and free translation, adjustment ofword order, unit shift, omission, addition and transliteration when translating film titles in order to create film title memes with high copying-fidelity, longevity andfecundity.