The Application Of Domestication And Foreignization In Film Title Translation From The Perspective Of Memetics

Nowadays, the film has become a popular and indispensable recreation in people’s life. With the prosperity of film market in China recent years, more and more foreign films have been introduced into China. As the symbol of a film, the title plays an influential role in advertising the film content, subliming the film theme, arousing audience’s interests and promoting box office. Meanwhile, it is believed that film title function as the carrier for cultural transmission and communication just like the film. Therefore, the process of film title translation is in essence a kind of cross-cultural communication. As a kind of text, English film titles are often concise in language, compact in structure and rich in the implication. Although the English-Chinese film title translation seems to be easier than the translation of longer text, it is not simple to make the film title translated perfectly both in meaning and emotion. As for the transmission of the cultural messages from the source title, it is much more challenging.As two cultural translation strategies, domestication and foreignization are often applied in film title translation. The topics concerning the position that these two strategies have in film title translation, the role that these two play respectively and the appropriateness of these two strategies have long been paid wide attention and discussed, and relevant researches have been done by some scholars.Memetics refers to an evolution theory for culture, studying the cultural transmitting models, the core concept of which is meme, the basic unit for culture imitation and transmission. In the sense of culture, the theory of Memetics have the possibility and capability of explain the application of domestication and foreignization in English film title translation.The thesis aims at discussing and analyzing the application of domestication and foreignization in the process of English film title translation from the perspective of Memetics which is a new theory for culture transmission. In the process of the research, the author has collected nearly400English film titles including their Chinese versions to build a corpus for the research. By listing, contrasting and comparing the translation of different English film titles with the theory of Memetics, the author has made the following conclusions after careful observation and analysis:1) Domestication and foreignization are two cultural translation strategies, neither of which is better than the other in translating English film titles. From the perspective of Memetics, no matter which strategy of the two is applied, the essence of the English film title translation is the transmission of successful memes through four phases. To this degree, domestication and foreignization play equally important roles in cultural communication and transmission.2) In the early stage of the communication between English culture and Chinese culture, domestication is adopted in English film title translation more with a reason that the target language readers (Chinese audience) know little about English culture so that they have great difficulty in decoding and absorbing the cultural messages conveyed by the English film title at that time. Therefore, domestication is applied to help Chinese readers understand the core meaning of the film title. However, with the frequent and deep communication of these two cultures, Chinese audience’s need and curiosity about the original flavor of English culture have also increased, which leads to more application of foreignization in the English film title translation. Thus the most authentic English culture can be retained for Chinese audience in this case.