Difficulties in Translating Movie Titles — страница 3

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called film stock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Films are produced by recording actual people and objects with cameras, or by creating them using animation techniques and/ or special effects. They comprise a series of individual frames, but when these images are shown rapidly in succession, the illusion of motion is given to the viewer. Film is considered by many to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten and inspire audience. The visual elements of cinema need no translation, giving the motion picture a universal power of communication. Any film can become a worldwide attraction, especially with the addition of dubbing or subtitles that translate the dialogue. Films are also artifacts created by

specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Films can be of different genres. In film theory, genre refers to the primary method of film categorization. A genre generally refers to films that share similarities in the narrative elements from which they are constructed. For example, the most widespread film genres are: comedy- intended to provoke laughter; horror- intended to provoke fear in audience; action- generally involves a moral interplay between “good” and “bad” played out through violence or physical force; melodramatic- mainly focuses on character development; adventure- involving danger, risk, and/ or chance, often with a high degree of fantasy and historical- taking place in the past. [12:739] Translation is an activity

comprising the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language- the source text- and the production, in another language, of a new, equivalent text- the target text, or translation. The goal of translation is generally to establish a relation of equivalence between the source and target texts (that is to say, to ensure that both texts communicate the same message), while taking into account a number of constraints. These constraints include context, the rules of grammar of languages, their writing conventions, their idioms, and the like. [12:739] Any form of audiovisual translation ultimately plays a unique role in developing both national identities and national stereotypes. The translation of cultural values in screen translation has received very little attention and

remains one of the most pressing areas of research in translation studies. Films can be tremendously influential and extremely powerful vehicle for transferring values, ideas and information. Different cultures are presented not only verbally but also visually and orally, as film is a polysemiotic medium that transfers meaning through several channels, such as picture, dialogue and music. Items which used to be culture-specific tend to spread and encroach upon other cultures. The choice of film translation mode largely contributes to the reception of a source language film in a target culture. However, there is no universal and good-for-all mode of translating films. The methods are dependent upon various factors, such as history, tradition or translating films in a given

country, various audience-related factors, the type of film to be rendered, as well as financial resources available. What is also of primary importance here is the mutual relationship between the source and target cultures, as it will also profoundly influence the translating process. [1:27] 1.2.  Types and History of Film Translation There are two major types of film translation: dubbing and subtitling. Each of them interferes with the original text to a different extent. On the one hand, dubbing is known to be the method that modifies the source text to a large extent and thus makes it familiar to the target audience through domestication. It is the method in which “the foreign dialogue is adjusted to the mouth and movements of the actor in the film” and its aim is

seen as making the audience feel as if they were listening to actors actually speaking the target language. On the other hand, subtitling, i.e. supplying a translation of the spoken source language dialogue into the target language in the form of synchronized captions, usually at the bottom of the screen, is the form that alters the source text to the least possible extent and enables the target audience to experience the foreign and be aware of its “foreignness” at all times. [3:611] It is known from the films translation history that in the times of silent movies, translation was relatively easy to conduct: the so-called intertitles interrupted the course of a film every couple of minutes, so the target language titles could easily be translated and inserted in place of the