A Study Of English And Chinese Film Title Translation From The Perspective Of Memetics

Along with increasingly extensive and intensive cultural exchange betweenChina and western countries, film, as an important part of culture, plays an importantrole in cross-cultural communication. Film title translation, to a great degree, decidesthe success of a film in other countries. Therefore, film title translation has become anissue that one cannot ignore. Although quite a lot of academic researches have beencarried out on film title translation, most of them mainly focus on discussingtranslation strategies or translation methods. As to why the strategies or methods areused and how a translated title is generated, few papers have touched upon. This papertries to explore the generative mechanism of film title translation from the perspectiveof Memetics.Memetics is a new theory to interpret cultural evolution based on Darwin’sevolution theory, which provides unique insights into the complicated relationshipbetween memes and culture. From the perspective of Memetics, each film title isviewed as a meme. Therefore, the generative process of film title translation is alsothe process of creating strong film title memes in target culture. According to thelifecycle theory of memes and Heylighen’s selection criteria for strong memes, alsowith the features of film titles and the results of the questionnaires, the author buildsup a model for film title translation. This model describes the five stages that a filmtitle translation goes through during the generative process and the four mostimportant criteria that should be followed. The five stages are hereditary stage,infecting and decoding stage, encoding and selecting stage, new hereditary stage, andnew infecting and decoding stage. Among them, the second and the third stages aremore important. The author emphasizes that at the infecting and decoding stage thetranslator should analyze the source linguistic meme, source cultural meme andsource aesthetic meme of the source film title, and then transform them intocorresponding target memes. Furthermore, the author elaborates the four most important selecting criteria for strong film title memes during the encoding andselecting stage, which are self-justification, simplicity, distinctiveness and coherence.Following that are two cases which are analyzed in details to show how the modelworks and how feasible and effective it is. Finally, the author comes up with fourtranslation strategies to create strong film title memes, which are copying sourcememes, borrowing target memes, imitating target memes and creating new memes.Through the above strategies, strong film title memes can be created in target cultureand translated film titles will be spread successfully.