The Study Of English Movie Title Translation From The Perspective Of Memetics

Since the constant development of globalization, the interactions of culture, politics and economy between different nations are more frequent. As a significant form of cultural transmission, large number of English movies flood into Chinese market and the movie title exerts great impact on the successful transmission of a movie. Therefore, movie title translation is a vital factor that determines whether an English movie can be accepted by Chinese audience and whether it can achieve satisfying profits and positive cultural influence.Memetics is a theory with a purpose to illustrate cultural evolution based on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Defined as the basic unit of cultural transmission, meme is spread through non-genetic methods like imitation. Memetics shows a strong appeal to many scholars from different fields since it was proposed. They try to obtain the enlightenment by applying memetics to the study of their field.This paper studies English movie title translation from the perspective of memetics. Translators are expected to perceive and decode all the information relevant to the movie title memes in the first place, including their linguistic, cultural and aesthetic features and then encode and translate them with new vector based on the language, culture and expectations of target audience. The translated movie titles should be strong memes which are attractive and can get hosts infected as soon as possible. Due to the great gaps of language and culture, translators are supposed to bear the characteristics of strong English and Chinese movie title memes in mind so that they can create strong movie title memes that are likely to be accepted by Chinese audience and infect more potential hosts by adopting proper translation strategies flexibly. It is proposed that memotype and phenotype of memes can be used for strong meme creation when dealing with English movie title translation.The aim of this paper is to get the due attention of translators to English movie title translation, offer a new perspective to the study of English movie title translation and broaden the practical application of memetics in a tentative way.