Strong Memes And Film Title Translation

The prospering film industry provides audience of different countries and different regions the access to films of foreign languages; thus, foreign market becomes a part that cannot be ignored by film producers. Film translation is necessary and requisite for the purpose of making films well accepted in foreign market. Film title, as the"eye"of a film, is the first impression of a film on the audience, and is believed to be one of the most essential factors that affect the box office. Consequently, owing to the importance of film titles and foreign audience's expectation to get information of the film from the translated film titles, film title translation is of paramount significance in deciding whether a film will get popular in foreign market or not. Although in recent years, certain progress has been made in film title translation, researches in academic circle on this issue are far from enough. Most of the studies are journal papers, a majority of which mainly explore the translation principles and methods at a practical level, lacking a systematic and effective theory to work as the guidance. Moreover, scarce attention has been given to translation of Chinese film titles, which is as pressing as English film title translation. Consequently, there still remains much room for exploration on E-C or C-E translation of film titles. This thesis tries to explore film title translation from a memetic approach, hoping to bring some inspiration to film title translation.Memetics is a theory on culture evolution and memes are units for cultural transmission surviving by getting replicated. A meme has to go through groups of selection criteria in order to be replicated successfully; those that can survive out of the selection are strong memes while those that cannot are weak memes. There exists close relationship between memetics and translation; translation is the activity of transmitting memes from one meme pool to another. This thesis holds that the essence of film title translation is to create strong memes. Translators bear the task of endowing the target memes the ability to infect as many potential hosts as possible within a short time, thereby drawing them to the cinema.The main body of the thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter One provides a theoretical framework, brings forth a working definition of"strong meme"and expounds the relationship between strong meme and translation practice. It is pointed out that since strong language memes can be divided into two types: strong memes in form and strong memes in content, the ultimate purpose of translation is to create strong language memes, either strong memes in form or strong memes in content. In Chapter Two, a comparative study on strong English film title memes and strong Chinese film title memes is carried out based on an analysis on naming approaches as well as main functions of film titles and the relationship between film titles and memes, proposing that film titles have four functions to fulfill: informative function, expressive function, aesthetic function and evocative function and they can be regarded as memes or memeplexes, and that the disparities between surviving environments of English film title memes and Chinese film title memes lead to prominent differences between English strong film title memes and Chinese strong film title memes, mainly at three levels: lexical and syntactic level, cultural level and aesthetic level. Chapter Three summarizes four main selection criteria for film title memes in transmission process, namely, simplicity criterion, distinctiveness criterion, self-justification criterion and coherence criterion, and proposes further that coherence criterion plays a decisive role in film title translation since translation involves dramatic changes in surviving environment of memes. Therefore, translators should always bear coherence in mind and apply the optimal translation strategies to make the target meme meet the target audience's needs at lexical and syntactic level, cultural level and aesthetic level. This thesis offers a relatively new theoretical perspective for E-C or C-E translation of film titles and studies the factors influencing the creation of strong film title memes in translation process in detail, hoping that it can provide effective guidance on film title translation practice.