On The Translation Of English Movie Titles:from The Perspective Of Communication

As an audiovisual art, movie has finally succeeded in finding its way in penetrating our lives and played an important role in transmitting cultural communications. As the window of movie, title not only reflects the central thought of movie, but also attracts the audience with brief and novel forms. But conspicuously, only if the title is translated well can the effects of art appreciation and commercial communication of movie be more likely to be acquired and activated to the maximum. Throughout the past two or three decades, great progress has been evidently witnessed in movie translation, whereas an integral part of movie, the title translation is still and indeed in urgent need of deeper exploration.Based on the above, this paper, through elaborating various recent English movie title translation works, tries to investigate deeper the English movie title translation from a comparatively originative way, that is, the Communication perspective. To begin with, according to the analysis of relationship among movie title, translation, and Commumcation, the author points out definitions and important elements within Communication, i.e. the transmitter, receiver, content, place, channel, purpose and effect; secondly, by means of comprehensively probing into unique characteristics of English movie title translation such as commercial effects and aesthetic values, distinguishing cultural awareness, versatile genres, some originative and exquisite rendering principles like being faithful to the original and being concise are successfully summarized, and eventually, by virtue of presenting abundant and diversified examples of translation of English movie titles with careful deliberation, lots of contributive and constructive translating techniques involving transliteration, literal translation, explication, free translation, adaptation and creation of a new title, etc. from the angle of Communication are displayed within this paper logically. Thus, more movie title translation practices can be further standardized and better understanding of movie themes can be attained by the audience.