On Translating English Film Titles from the Cultural Perspective Introduction

As an audiovisual art, film is one of the most influential mass media, it follows and reflects people’s life and it is a product of particular culture. Over the past decades, with the increase in cultural exchanges, the western movies have gradually entered the Chinese market and held an important position in Chinese people’s recreational life.
The film title, being short in form but rich in meaning, has its own cultural, linguistic, aesthetic features. A properly-translated English movie title should be concise, condensed and compact, which can grip the attention of the audience at their first sight and stimulate their association with the plot, reveal the theme or offer some clue. So they deserve careful investigation and consideration from the translator. However, as a branch of non-literary translation, it has not yet received due attention despite their importance. Peter Newmark has called on the translators to bring their attention to “two underplay aspects of translation”, one of which is “the approach to non-literary translation. Nida also called for more attention to exploring new fields in translation.
Therefore, in this thesis, I will introduce the general features and functions of English film titles, analyzing the translation techniques largely employed in film title translation. Furthermore, I will examine from the cultural perspective the different versions in Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and analyze the relevant strategies adopted and the effectiveness of these strategies. The social-cultural context of each region will be explored to find the factors resulting in this disunity in versions