A Study Of Film Title Translation From The Perspective Of Translation Ethics

With the acceleration of cultural communication between China and other countries,the cultural life of people becomes increasingly rich. Thus the film has become an indispensable entertainment manner in people’s daily life. The film not only simply shows a story, but also an intuitive way to reveal the national culture connotation. The film plays a vital role in promoting cultural communication between different countries and enhancing mutual understanding between the people of different nations. Unlike other forms of art, the film can not be displayed like books or newspapers. It is always the film title that attracts the audiences firstly. Therefore, the film title translation is very important for the film’s publicity. Many schoolars have made researches on film title translation:some scholars believe that film title translation should be guided with the traditional Chinese translation theory, which means putting the “trust” and “faithfulness” in the first place and stresses that the translated title must be faithful to the original title; some scholars study film title translation from the perspective of skopos theory; and some scholars from the perspective of intertextuality. Nowadays, some scholars begin to study film title translation from the perspective of translation ethics.Ethics is a series of behavior standards that developed on the basis of the core values of human beings. The main function of ethics is to regularize people’s behavior and guide people to make appropriate choices in dealing with the relationship between self and others.Translation is a complex social activity, which involves many factors, such as language,culture, author, translator, source text, translated text and so on. The nature of translation determines that it needs the guidance of ethics. The concept of “translation ethics” is put forward by the French translation theorist Antoine Berman first, which has caused widespread concern in the translation circle. Anthony Pym, as another scholar who promotes the study of translation ethics, firstly proposed the concept of “inter-culturality”.He believes that the focus of translation ethics is the inter-subject ethics or professional ethics. Later, the American translation theorist Lawrence Venuti puts forward a theroy which stresses the linguistic and cultural differences of the original text in the process of translation, namely the “ethics of difference.” During this period, Finland scholar Andrew Chesterman also makes a new important contribution to the study of translation ethics. On the basis of previous studies, he puts forward five models of translation ethics: ethics of representation, ethics of service, ethics of communication, norm-based ethics and ethics of commitment. Five ethical models proposed by Chesterman form a “tension net” that regulates, restricts and balances the translator’s activity, which have great significance inguiding the translation studies and practices.Based on Chesterman’s five models of translation ethics, this thesis systematically analyzes the film title translation. Most film titles in this thesis are chosen from the Oscar-winning films or the films which are well-known by Chinese audiences. Through the study, the author has drawn the following three conclusions: first, it is feasible to apply Chesterman’s five models to analysimg film title translation, which provides a new angle to the study of film title translation; second, in the process of film title translation, the translator should follow different models of translation ethics according to their own features and functions; third, the contradictions between the models of translation ethics can be mediate, and corresponding mediations are also provided in this thesis.