A Brief Analysis of English Film Title Translation from the Perspective of the Strategies of Domestication and Foreignization

Abstract

The film is a highly influential and popular audio-visual art. The title of a movie is the epitome and essence of its content. Films are both cultural arts and commercial products. An excellent film title translation plays an important role in promoting film transmission, which includes social functions such as conveying film information, showing the beauty of language and promoting box office revenue. As the continuous deepening of globalization and the prosperity of the China's film and television industry, there is an increasing number of foreign films entered the Chinese market and some influential and acclaimed Chinese films also accessed to international market. In this process, it is inevitable to involve the linguistic, cultural and aesthetic differences between the source language and the target language. Faced with the cultural differences in translation, the core issue is how to flexibly use translation strategies to have the translation of film titles to be the best. This paper analyzes the application of domestication and foreignization strategies in the process of translating English film titles, and discusses the interrelationship between these two strategies, the effects they achieved respectively and the development trend of them.