Translation Of Film Titles From A Multi-Perspective Approach

Film as a form of artistic works is created by certain cultures. It can reflect theircultural value orientation and their attitudes towards the world. It is considered to bea vital media of cultural output and communication because the audiences fromvarious educational attainments can be influenced by it no matter they like it or not,the cultures, living styles and thinking methods from the source language has alreadypresented in front of them. The title of a film reflects the soul of the film. A propertitle can bring the film more reputation, so a proper version of the title translationmay contribute to the success of the film and play an indispensable role in theoutputting of a film to non-native language speakers. Although there are severalsystematic principles on film title translation, none of them can put forward aprinciple applied universally to guide the translation of film title.This thesis concentrates on the research of the translation of film titles from a multi-perspective approach which involves Nida’s equivalence translation theory, Venuti’sforeignization, German functional school’s Skopos theory, cultural perspective andNord’s “Functionality plus Loyalty” principle. And it attempts to point out thelimitations of the current research and put forward some suggestions in thetranslation of film titles.Through the quantitative and qualitative researches based on large numbers of film titles, the author drew a conclusion is that the research on the translation of film titleshouldn’t be guided under certain translation theory as analyzed in this thesis, justlike German functional school’s Skopos theory is a kind of compromise to thedisputes involving“domestication” and “foreignization”, the author suggests that thetranslator should be required to have a good command of all these translationtheories, then adopt a corresponding translation mothed from certain perspective orthe combination of several perspectives based on a specific case to fulfill themarketization and commercialization of the film.