A Study Of Movie Title Translation From The Perspective Of Conceptual Integration Theory

Movie is an artistic form as well as a form of mass culture which is developing rapidly in China since 1990 s. In addition to the prosperity of Chinese movie industry, an increasing number of English movies are imported and welcomed by Chinese. Besides the movie content, translated movie title contributes significantly to the success of English movie in China. Movie title translation is a complex process which is based on people’s knowledge reserves and cognitive model. Movie title is the eye of a movie, from which the audience get as much information as they can at first sight and may also influence audience’ interest and even have impact on box office. Therefore, movie title translation has long been a field of study for scholars. Previous scholars have done many researches about translation strategies from the semantic perspective, functionalist perspective, pragmatic perspective, and the cultural perspective. However, the research on the cognitive mechanism in movie title translation has not been deeply conducted so the thesis intends to study movie title translation from the perspective of cognition to figure out the backstage cognition of movie title translation as well as the cause of disunity of translated movie titles.The study cases of English-Chinese movie titles are selected from magazines, such as Movie View, World Screen and Movie world; related books and Internet Movie Database.In recent decades conceptual integration theory got more and more attentions because the structure of this theory is dynamic and uniform. It has been used to analyze various cognitive activities and phenomenon. This theory evolves from mental space theory, generally to describe on-line meaning construction and integration of information. There are four basic mental spaces: two input spaces, a generic space and a blended space, which are linked through the inter-mappings. Two input spaces are linked through the cross-space mappings on account of the pragmatic relations of the counterparts in two input spaces. Generic space involves the common abstract frame from two input spaces, which is the core of cross-space mapping. Elements from input spaces are selectively projected to the blended space in which an emergent structure is created through composition, completion and elaboration. The existence of generic space makes the different cultural schemata have something in common and the emergent structure can explain the creativity of cognition. According to Fauconnier, CIT involves four basic networks: simplex network, mirror network, single-scope network and double-scope network. This thesis intends to analyze the cognitive mechanism in EnglishChinese movie title translation process from the conceptual integration theory(CIT). With the powerful explanatory power, the thesis intends to study human’s translation activities of English-Chinese movie title from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, by combining CIT with movie title translation cognitive process to explore the cognitive mechanisms of movie title translation.The thesis focuses on establishing the translation network model which is structured with the original movie title space, the translator space, generic space as well as the translated movie title space. Translated movie titles are the results of the integration among the four spaces. Besides, it studies the analysis of translation process and the application of different types of integration network. In E-C movie title translation, the establishment of translator space and the three operations are greatly up to features and functions of movie titles and translators’ knowledge structure, preference, aesthetic value etc. In other words, the production of translated movie titles relies on translators’ cognitive abilities, background knowledge, thinking models and association which are indispensable factors for movie title translation. In addition, different integration networks will produce different versions of translated movie title therefore in order to obtain the well-accepted translated movie title, movie title translation need several times integration and modification rather than once and for all. Moreover, according to optimality principles, the emergent structure of conceptual integration i.e. translated movie titles can be unpacked to reconstruct mental spaces, crossspace mapping, selective projections and other connections, which can be a way to testify the faithfulness of translated movie titles.CIT provides a new viewpoint for the study of movie title translation and has some practical significance so as to find that the inter-mappings among mental spaces give us a clear and intuitive view about the translation activities.