Linguocultural localization of movie titles

Abstract

Due to intensive growth of film production and the expansion of the “market of film consumption”, the need for high-quality translation of feature films into different languages is becoming more and more pressing. While a foreign language film is localized, text elements are not only translated, but also adapted to the culture of the target audience, i.e. we are witnessing transition from one language and cultural code to another. Taking into account their structural, semantic, and functional pragmatic features, film titles are vivid representative materials for the study of modern translation practices in the light of the cultural transference concept (Bassnett 2005, Bastin 1990, Cranmer 2015, Jurt 2007, Кatan 1999, Leinen 2007, Thill 2007, Schreiber 1998, Slyshkin, Efremova 2004, Obolenskaya 2013, Snetkova 2009, Fedorova 2009). The purpose of the article is to identify the strategies of linguocultural localization of French film names for the modern Russian-speaking audience, as well as to determine the degree of its adequacy. Regardless of the choice of the translation strategy, the title should correspond to the plot, thematic focus and ideological and figurative content of the film, while remaining interesting and attractive to the audience. We analysed of eighty-seven French feature films of various genre affiliations (detectives, action films, dramas, melodramas, comedies, thrillers and fantasy), released in Russian from 2000 to 2018, and their translation equivalents. We used the methods of semantic, pragmatic, contextual and linguocultural analysis to identify a set of problems arising in the process of localization of film titles and to offer recommendations for their translation into Russian, considering the communicative specifics of the modern film discourse and the ethnic and cultural characteristics of the target audience.