Film is both an artistic form and mental product, with which cultural, political, and ideological elements are conveyed. The translation of film titles may be quite different from that of other kinds of literary forms, such as novels, poems, etc.. As has been stated above, a good translation of film titles may add charm to the film and contribute a lot to the box-office value. The film title, being short in form but rich in meaning, has its own linguistic, aesthetic and cultural features, to which the translator should pay much attention. Before we come to the core of the thesis, it is quite necessary to make a general analysis of English film titles in order that it will provide a better understanding of the research subject.
2.1 Film Genre
Generally speaking, film usually falls into three types: documentary, educational and fictional. The documentary film mainly seeks to provide the audience with information, for instance, the historic and newsworthy events, social customs, manners, the development of societies and human civilization, and so on. The educational film refers to that which is made with the primary purpose of teaching
some subject of matters or skills. The fictional film is the most popular type of motion pictures, which is most commonly shown in large movie theatres. Such type of film
usually tells an interesting fictional story, which, to some extent, can be accepted by a large proportion of audience.
From the above, one may see that the first two types mainly serve the purpose of information transmission, which are plain in style and formal in wording, and intended for a relatively small group of audience, while the third is usually intended to entertain wide and varied audience, thus possessing strong emotional color to attract
the attention of the audience. Limited by space, this thesis will only deal with the translation of fictional film titles.
To put it in details, fictional films can be further divided into four types, namely, horror film, fantasy film, comic film, and lyric film. For the horror film, which focuses on the thrilling effect, its title is mainly served to create some kind of soul-stirring atmosphere, for example, The Ring((午夜凶铃》,The Silence of the Lamb((沉默的羔羊》,and so on. For the second type, it is visionary and imaginative, which usually tells a story completing with distant planet, great dark, environmental changes, space travel, futuristic technology, unknown forces, extraordinary monsters(creatures from outer space), etc.. Its title is supposed to reveal the novel idea of the film and bring about a kind of fantastic atmosphere, for example, Star Wars: Episode II-Attack of the Clones《星球大战前传:克隆人的进攻》,Spider Man《蜘蛛侠》,and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone《哈里·波特与魔法石》.For the comic film, it is designed to provoke the laughter by exaggerating the situation, the language, action and characters. Correspondingly, its title should be tinged with comic flavor in order to produce a humorous and amazing effect for the film, for instance, Mr. Doubtfire《肥妈先生》C or《窈窕奶爸》)and Home Alone《小鬼当家》. Main characters in animations are usually those lovely animals or things that are embodied with life. For this reason, the animated films are categorized into the comic genre and the translated film titles should naturally produce an amazing effect for the film. For example, Toy Story((玩具总动员》,Stuart Little((精灵鼠小弟》,and so on. The last type is the lyric film. Many films can be put into this group, such as love stories,
musical films, family films and war films. The titles of these films should be rich in lyric flavor and quite close to the style of prose, for example, A Walk in the Clouds《云中漫步》.
2.2 Features of English Film Titles
Although films, as a kind of literary form, have something in common with other literary forms, they also possess some unique features, which make them different
from others. The same is true of the case of film titles. As a mode of cultural transmission, film titles involve many complicated cultural factors; as an artistic form, they Have an aesthetic function in nature; as a kind of commodity, they must possess commercial values. The features of film titles will be analyzed in the following perspectives, namely, linguistic, cultural, aesthetic, and commercial perspectives.
2.2.1 Linguistic Features
As a special type of popular culture, film title has its own unique linguistic features. In most cases, English film titles are very short, concise and compact with regard to the structure, yet rich in meaning, which, to some extent, are summarizations of the whole film. In the view of the form, sometimes they employ one or two words as titles, which may be the name of the protagonist or the place where the story takes place, for instance, Alexander((亚历山大大帝》,Pearl Harbor ((珍珠港》;sometimes, they adopt various kinds of phrases as titles, namely, noun phrases, verb phrases and prepositional phrases, which are exemplified in the following titles: The Sound of the Music((音乐之声》,consisting of a modifier and
the word it modifies; Meet the Parents((拜见岳父岳母大人)),using the structure of a verb-object phrase; On Golden Pond《金色池塘》,employing the prepositional phrase. There is no denying that there are some instance that some long film titles do appear, for example, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King《指环王:王者归来》.However, such lengthy titles are comparatively few in number.
2.2.2 Cultural Features
All good films are social products of cultural phenomena and ideological trend of certain times. Films are produced to reflect the reality and the current issues with which ordinary people are concerned. In a sense, they really touch the social life from different angles. Such cultural features can also be reflected at the level of film titles.
Film titles are closely related to various aspects of societies, such as religion, history, philosophy, social customs, and so on. More often than not, cultural features
are closely related to the quotation of idioms and allusions, which convey rich cultural meanings. For example, films such as Seven, Original Sin, and Adam's Rib are enveloped in strong Western color, and clearly show the great influence upon English film titles exerted by western religious culture.
2.2.3 Aesthetic Features
Films, an audio-visual art, can provide the audience with aesthetic entertainment
through their perfect combination of sound, color, and moving pictures. Generally speaking, the. aesthetic characteristics of film titles are closely related to the application of rhetorical devices, such as simile, metaphor, irony, contrast, personification, alliteration, oxymoron, and so on. The employment of rhetorical devices has been proved to be effective and powerful, because the carefully designed devices used in film titles help either to create some special kind of atmosphere, to arouse the imagination or to move the passion. For example:
Crystal Heart (metaphor)
Dances with Wolves (personification)
Sense and Sensibility (alliteration)
True Lies (oxymoron)
tiger! Tiger! Tiger !(repetition)
2.2.4 Commercial Features
As a popular artistic form, films are products of commercialization. A successful film should be the one that can great box-office hit. To some extent people to the cinema and that should become a great box-office hit.To some extent ,it is. justified in saying that a film will be meaningless if it cannot attract the public attention and bring large profit. Therefore, film titles should always be eye-catching and be tinged with commercial color. In a sense, such characteristic can help to boom the film industry. However, this does not mean that one can merely, pursue large commercial profit by providing some queer titles with no regard to the connotation of the original.
2.3 Functions of English Film Titles
Function is a topic widely discussed in translation studies. Being the eyes of the film contents and the spirit of the film advertisement, film titles often perform two or three functions to fulfill their ultimate purposes. The basic principle of functionalism in translation is the orientation towards the (prospective) function of the target text Nord, 2006: 79). Translation is always realized for a target situation with its determining factors (receiver, time and place of reception, etc.), in which the target text is supposed to fulfill a certain function which can and, indeed, must be specified in advance (ibid.: 32). Therefore, the functions of any text to be translated are important factors to which the translator should attach much importance during the: process of translation.
According to Vermeer, "function refers to what a text means or is intended to mean from the receiver's point of view." (Nord, 2004: 28). Each text is produced for a given purpose and should serve this purpose. The same is true of the translated text, which is supposed to function in the target culture for the target receivers.
For Reiss, text functions are closely related to text types. Based on the `organon model' of language functions proposed by Karl Buhler, Reiss divides texts into three basic types, namely, informative, expressive and operative text. "The depictive function is emphasized in content-focused texts, the expressive function emphasizing form-focused texts, and the persuasive function emphasizing appeal-focused texts." (Reiss, 2004: 25).
In his A Textbook of Translation, Peter Newmark adopts and adapts the Biihler-Jakobson functions of language. According to Biihler, the three main functions of language are the expressive, the informative and the vocative functions. For Jakobson, there are three other functions of language: the aesthetic, the phatic and the metalingual. Based on these, Newmark proposes three functions, namely, the expressive, the informative and the vocative.
Similarly, in her Translation as a Purposeful Activity, Nord also puts forward the following language functions: the referential, the expressive, the appellative and the
phatic.
Actually, in spite of different names, these functions bear a certain degree of similarities with each other. The informative function may correspond to the referential function, the aesthetic to the expressive, and the appellative to the vocative. With the help of the above theories along with the specific features of film titles, the author of this thesis will analyze the functions of film titles as follows: the informative function, the aesthetic function and the commercial (appellative) function.
2.3.1 Informative Function
The informative function is the basic function that any film title should possess. As the representative of a film, it is agreed that the film title should be of high-information value. A title without are y informative value can be said meaningless. Successful film titles are supposed to carry as much information as possible in order to enable the audience to get a thorough understanding of the film content. According to Newmark (2001 a: 40), the core of the informative function of language is external situation, the facts of a topic, reality outside language, including reported ideas or theories. In this thesis, the interpretation of the informative function is two-fold.
In a narrow sense, it means that a film title is supposed to provide the audience with the basic information about the film. In other words, by seeing the film title, the audience may infer the information about the film genre, the general plot, the main character(s), the place or the time when the story takes place.
Some film titles indicate the film genre, for instance, Star Wars((星球大战》, Armageddon((世界末日))) , Mission to Mars《火星任务》,which are science fiction