On the Translation of English Movie Titles

Abstract

The film, a popular art with both artistic and commercial values, is one of the most influential mass media. Film looks like a piece of mirror, which reflects all the respects of human society, including the material world and the spiritual world as well. With large quantities of English movies being introduced into China, more and more movie titles are translated into Chinese, some well done while some poorly done. Exploring the present situation of film titles, within the framework of audience-oriented approach, this paper tries to generalize some principles, such as faithfulness, cultural awareness, and combination of commercial and aesthetic effects, of film titles with abundant examples. Based on the foregoing analysis, some concrete techniques of film title translation are discussed, such as transliteration, literal translation and explication.