An Analysis Of The English Movie Title Translation From The Perspective Of Skopostheories

With the increasing cross-cultural communication and cooperation, more and more foreign films, especially English films are introduced into Chinese film market, so the film works translation attracts increasing concern of the translating field. Film title is regarded as the trade mark of a film. Usually the title is first thing that audiences learn about a film and it is an indispensable part of the film. A good film title can not only convey the content, genre and other relevant information about the film, but also arouse audiences' imagination and curiosity. However, in the domestic film market a common phenomenon is that there are several titles for only one source film, and some of them are so different that audiences may feel confused.What theory can guide film title translation? And what criteria can be used to evaluate film title translation? This paper tries to demonstrate Skopostheorie is effective to guide film title translation by taking Academy Awards winners as the research object. According to the Skopostheorie, the top-ranking for any translation is the "Skopos rule", which says that a translational action is determined by its Skopos; that is "the end justifies the means"The target receivers of films are cinemagoers, while film title is the trade mark of the film and it should be audience-oriented likewise. Film title should arouse audiences' interest to watch the film, thus to bring profit, which is the ultimate goal of film title translation. A successful film title should fulfill informative, expressive, aesthetic and vocative functions. In order to achieve the final purpose of film title translation, the translator should take the cultural, informative, aesthetic and commercial values into full consideration. Cultural differences between China and America are also reflected in the naming of films. The translator should fully understand the cultural elements and connotations in the source title and convey them correctly when conducting film title translation, so that the translated version could easily be accepted by the target audiences. Information about the genre, the theme and the background of the film can help to call upon target audiences to buy tickets if translators properly translate the original titles, so the translator should produce a translated version correctly conveying information provided by the source title. Film title should be able to render aesthetic enjoyment to audiences. In order to achieve this aesthetic beauty, translators should try their best to gain the two levels of linguistic beauty of film title, namely the beauty of form and the beauty of content. That is to say aesthetically beautiful translated film titles should be musical in sound and vivid in content. To fulfill the skopos of film title translation, translators may consider the following suggestion:first, eye-catching words can be chosen for stimulating audiences'different emotions; thought-provoking elements, like question form of the title, can be implemented to arouse audiences'interests.Applying Skopostheorie to film title translation, the translator can understand the nature of its translation skopos in deep and clearly know its purpose. By conducting cases analysis of Academy Awards winners, the author proves that the Skopostheorie is effective to guide translators to translate film titles.