A Study Of The Translation Of English Feature Movie Titles Into Chinese From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

With the deepening of China’s reform and open-up policy and booming economy,China has strengthened its cultural communication with the world. Nowadays more andmore English movies come into China’s market. As a product of culture and societydevelopment, movies play a significant role in enhancing international cultural exchange.How can the audience choose the movies they want to enjoy from the mountains of movies?The movie title takes up the “guiding role” for the audience. A good translated movie titlenot only adds glamour to the whole movie, but also attracts the audience, stirs up theircuriosity and calls upon them to see the movie. So the effective advertisement promotionfunction can improve the economic profit and realize the commercial value, which is theultimate purpose of movie titles. The translation of movie titles has drawn more and moreattention and has become a more and more important part in China’s translation field.The Skopos Theory was put forward by German linguist Hans Vermeer. He proposesthat translation process is not only a simple Interlingua transform, but a type of purposefulintercultural communication act. Translation is a type of purposeful action. Skopos Theorypays attention to the aim or purpose of the translation action. Its core concept is the skoposdetermines the strategies. And in order to realize the skopos, any reasonable and feasiblestrategies can be applied. This thesis tries to study the Chinese translation of Englishfeature movie titles from the perspective of Skopos Theory. It is proper to adopt SkoposTheory to instruct the process of the Chinese translation of English feature movie titles.The application of Skopos Theory to the Chinese translation of English feature movietitles can help the realization of the functions of movie titles and the promotion of featuremovies.Movies can be categorized into different types based on different standards. Generallyspeaking, movies can be divided into three categories: documentary movies, educational movies and feature movies. The first two types of movies are highly professional moviesin certain field; their dissemination is far less extensive than the third type and has muchless contact with the general audience than the third type. Most of the movies that peopleget access to in their daily life are feature movies. Therefore, this thesis does not talkabout the first two types of movies but only studies the third type of movies-featuremovies. The focus on the study of titles of feature movies can consummate the studies onthe Chinese translation of English movie titles.Through the use of many classic and popular translation examples of English featuremovie titles, this thesis draws the following conclusions: Skopos Theory puts forward afresh new judging standard for the translation of movie titles. It gives the translator morefreedom so he can fully develop his initiative and creation ability and adopt appropriatetranslation strategies in order to realize the purpose. The Skopos Theory providestheoretical basis and strong theoretical support for the various kinds of translationstrategies used in the process of movie titles translation. The effective combination ofSkopos Theory and the Chinese translation of titles of English feature movies plays a rolein the realization of the functions of movie titles and the promotion and dissemination ofEnglish feature movies and contributes to the implementation of the esthetic value andeconomic value of feature movies.