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ABSTRACT:With the development of culture exchange in the world, more and more English films have been introduced into our country, whichhave gained preference of the Chinese people. At the same time, Chinese films are favored by foreign audience. Film title is an important part of film language, and the first part to be directly confronted with the audiences, whose translation plays a critical role in promotion of the film production in international film market. As we all know, film title is also a portion of the social language, so it surely relate to aspects of the social culture, such as politics, economics, history, religion, etc.. Therefore, how to bridge the comprehension gap of the audiences from different cultural background is crucial to film title translation. Contextual Adaptation Theory, a hot topics in pragmatics nowadays, mainly talks about the key to bridge the gap of different contextual backgrounds, so this paper will apply contextual adaptation to the film title translation. Firstly, the importance of the film title translation is analyzed from the perspective of commerce, culture and art; then the paper discusses the main factors of film title translation, that is the difference of the cultural backgrounds; in the following chapter, Contextual Adaptation Theory is introduced in details, for the purpose of exploring the proper strategies of film title translation.
Key words: film title; translation; cultural difference; contextual adaptation; translation strategy
1 Introduction
As we all known, film is an audio-visual art. This glamorous act is a magnificent gem in human history, which creates romantic stories and leads human into a marvelous land we have never come before. Looking back to the development history of film, we cannot deny that film reflects the society reality and the time spirit. As the cultural exchange between China and overseas become booming, film plays an important role as culture envoy. Film was entrusted with the mission to let more people from different cultural backgrounds to enjoy the entertainment and share advanced technology together. This is an unavoidable trend in the world now.
As the most popular form of mass communication, film has accompanied human for almost one century. In the long history, film industry experiences six serious changes. From the era of film’s father Liaster brother taking black and white documentary into people’s life to the era of talkie, ever-big change of film industry has remarkable significance in human history. Countless famous film stars show their charming glamour on the screen and many excellent films are popular with audience in the whole world. Entering into 21 century, the film industry continues to develop rapidly, which is entrusted with the mission to let more people with different cultural background understand foreign culture. As the development of society, the trend of film importing and exporting is unavoidable due t |
