A Study On Film Title Translation From The Perspective Of Memetics

The deepening of economic globalization of different countries continuously strengthens the contact and communication in various aspects, especially in economy and culture. As an important means of culture spreading and exchanging, film has been involved in the tide of economic globalization depending on advanced science and technology, which is reflected not only in multinational cooperation of film making, but also in the increasing number of the importation and exportation of films. It aims at meeting and enriching people’s growing consumption demand. Abundant films adopt double subtitles, and film title translation deserves much of researcher’s attention. Film translation includes subtitling and dubbing, and film title translation can by no means be ignored. A successful translation of film title can not only refresh the audiences to make it unforgettable, but also greatly promote the publication of the film.Memetics is mainly used to expound cultural evolution when it was firstly put forward at the end of last century. With many researchers showing interest in memetics, it has been applied to other fields, including linguistics, biology, etc. Meme refers to the transmission of information, behavior and knowledge in a non-genetic way via replication and imitation to make it survive. In the transmission process, not all of memes can be transmitted, but have to follow some principles.The thesis studies film title translation from the perspective of memetics. By discussing the relation between language and meme, the author holds the view that both Chinese film title and English film title are meme. Then a comparison between Chinese film title memes and English film title memes is made. It is found that the two kinds of film title have similarities as well as their own distinctive characteristics in terms of language, culture and aesthetics. The essence of film title translation is to transform the original film title meme to target language meme. According to memetics, in order to transmit source meme successfully, some principles need to be followed, e.g. distinctiveness, authority, etc, to make the target meme more appropriate and acceptable to target language and target audience. By studying some specific film titles, the author found that the following principles are more appropriately applied to film title translation, namely, simplicity, distinctiveness, self-justification as well as coherence. Meanwhile, according to memetics, the following translation strategies are often adopted in film title translation, including literal translation, transposition, unit shift, paraphrase, information change, etc. Therefore, from the perspective of memetics, translator has to follow the above principles and adopt flexible translation strategies to transfer the form or idea of source meme to the target audience.