从目的论角度谈英文电影名的翻译.doc

Acknowledgement My deepest gratitude first and foremost to my supervisor, Miss ?, for her constant encouragement and guidance. She has guided me through all the stages and parts of the writing of the thesis. Without her consistent and illuminating instructions, this thesis couldnt have reached its present form. Her conscientious instruction and profound knowledge impresses me deeply and will continue to exert great influence on my future study. I would like to extend my greatest gratitude to all my teachers from English Department, who had carefully kept teaching and leading me in English study for the past 4 years. I appreciate their illuminating advice and insightful suggestions to my study. Last but not the least, my thanks would go to my beloved family for their loving considerations and great confidence in me all through these years. I also owe my sincere gratitude to my friends and my fellow classmates who gave me their help and time in listening to me and helping me to work out my problems during the difficult course of the thesis.Translation of English Movie Titles from the Perspective of Skopos TheoryAbstractAlthough short as they are, movie titles have a remarkable influence on box-offices. There have been many methods to translate posed by scholars in China. Skopos Theory, put forward by Hans Vermeer, forms the main structure of the functionalist translation theory. It does not only focus on translation at the linguistic level, but also emphasizes the roles of the translator and culture in translation. “The end decides the means” is its most distinctive feature, which allows much room for the translator in the use of a satisfactory method to solve the problems occurred when they translate. Compared with the former translation theories, many new breakthroughs have been made，which presents a new perspective for the translation of English movie titles.This thesis mainly classifies features of film titles, the development of Skopos Theory and the translation method through Skopos Theory, to probe into different methods for different title types in terms of Skopos theory as the guidance.Key Words: Skopos Theory, the End Decides the Means, English Movie Titles从目的论角度谈英文电影片名的翻译内 容 摘 要 电影片名虽然较短，但是它对电影的票房和传播会产生巨大影响。国内有众多学者已从很多角度提出了电影片名翻译的很多方法。汉斯威密尔提出的目的论是功能翻译理论的核心理论。它不仅仅从语言层面上去关注翻译，同时也强调译者和文化在翻译中的作用。“目的决定方法”是它的最突出的特点，它给予了译者很大的空间去采用自己满意的方法来解决翻译中遇到的难题。相对于以前的翻译理论来说，该理论有一系列的突破，为英文电影片名翻译提供了一个新的视角。本文将从分析电影片名的特点及作用入手，阐述目的论的形成发展过程以及探讨如何运用目的论翻译电影片名，提出不同的影片根据其题材和内容应采用具体的不同的方法。 关键词: 目的论 目的决定方法 电影片名 Contents1. A Brief Introduction of English Movie Titles11.1 The Features of English Movie Titles11.2 The Functions of English Movie Titles21.2.1 Informative Function21.2.2 Cultural Function31.2.3 Aesthetic Function31.2.4 Commercial Function42. A Brief introduction of Skopos Theory52.1 Four Stages of Skopos Theory 62.2 Basic Principles of Skopos Theory73. The Functional Analysis of Movie Title Translation 83.1 Movie Title Translation as a Purposeful Activity83.2 Movie Title Translation as an Interpersonal Interaction103.3 Movie Title Translation as an Intercultural Activity114. Translation Strategy utilized in Movie Title Translation124.1 Transliteration124.2 Literal Translation134.3 Translation of Word-for-Word134.4 Liberal Translation144.5 Adjustment of Word Order or Structure144.6 Adaptation155. Conclusion16References18Translation of English Movie Titles from the Perspective of Skopos Theory1. A Brief Introduction of English Movie TitlesTheres no doubt that a good translation of English movie titles could add radiance to the movie and contribute a lot to the box-office value. The English movie titles, usually 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 this paper, it is quite necessary to make a general analysis of English movie titles in order that it will provide a better understanding of the research subject.1.1 The Features of Movie TitlesAlthough movies, as a kind of literary form, have something in common with other literary forms, they also have some unique features, which make them different from others. It is the same with the case of movie titles.Linguistic Feature can never be ignored in movie titles. English movie titles are usually very short, simple and compact with regard to the structure, but very rich in meaning. In the view of the form, sometimes they just use one or two words as titles, which may be the name of the protagonist or the place where the story takes place, for instance, Avatar阿凡达, sometimes, they adopt various kinds of phrases as titles, namely, noun phrases, verb phrases and prepositional phrases, here are some examples: Dare to Love Me敢于爱我, using the structure of a verb-object phrase; The Risk Pool危险赌注, prepositional phrase was employed.Aesthetic Feature is also an obvious feature of English movie tiles. Generally speaking, the aesthetic characteristics of movie titles are closely related to the application of rhetorical devices, such as simile, metaphor, irony, personification, alliteration, and so on. The employment of rhetorical devices has been proved to be effective and powerful, because the carefully designed devices used in movie titles help either to create some special kind of atmosphere, to arouse the imagination or to move the passion. Some old examples are listed as following: Dances with Wolves (personification) Pride and Prejudice (alliteration) True Lies (oxymoron)Another important feature of English movie titles is Cultural Feature, which is closely related to various aspects of societies, such as religion, philosophy, history and so on. Mostly, idioms and allusions are often used in the movie titles which reflect its cultural feature and convey rich cultural meanings. For example, movies such as Rashomon 2010 罗生门2010, Gospel According to Janis詹尼斯福音are colored in strong Western color, and clearly show the great influence upon English movie titles exerted by western religious culture.1.2 The Functions of English Movie TitlesThe basic principle of functionalism in translation is the orientation towards the prospective of the target text Christiane Nord, 2006: Text Analysis in Translation: Theory, Methodology, and Didactic Application of a Model for Translation一Oriented Text Analysis (second edition), Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, P.79. Generally speaking, four functions as the informative, cultural, aesthetic and commercial functions can be usually found in good movie titles. The deeper discussion about the features will be listed as below.1.2.1 Informative FunctionThe plots or the themes of the movies, just like any other kind of titles, should be indicated in movie titles. That is to say, the title at least is ought to show something about the movies. Audiences should have some understanding and information about the movie before they buy the tickets and step into the cinema. Here, a movie title plays an important role. Certainly, it is impossible for the audiences to wholly understand the movie plot or theme only at the sight of the title, nor do we hope so, otherwise the process of watching a movie turns to be meaningless. The informative function just means some curiosity of the audiences about the movie. The informative function is the basic function that any movie title should possess. A title without any informative value can be judged meaningless. Successful movie titles are supposed to carry as much information as possible in order to enable the audience to get a thorough understanding of the movie content. Newmark once said, “The core of the informative function of language is the reality outside language, facts of a topic, external situation, including reported ideas or theories.” Peter Newmark, 2001: A Textbook of Translation, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, P.24Some of the main characters of the movie are sometimes disposed in the titles, for example, Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy马克吐温和艾迪夫人. Whats going on in the movie is gave hint in some titles, for example, Untitled Jason Bourne Project未定名杰森伯恩计划. The backgrounds of the movies sometimes are revealed in the movie titles, which consist of several aspects, such as time, place and environment in which the story takes place. For example, Robin hood罗宾汉， Madagascar马达加斯加.1.2.2 Cultural FunctionIn the above we have mentioned that movies are the products of mental activities. The purpose of movies is to record and to reflect peoples life. So are movie titles, which should possess cultural transmission function. As has been stated before, cultural features of movies are usually closely related to the quotation of idioms and allusions. As we know, in western countries, peoples daily life is greatly influenced by religious beliefs, which in turn have exerted influence on movie titles. For instance, the movie title Original Sin is enveloped in strong western color. It comes from the Bible, referring to the inborn sin of human beings.According to the Bible, there are two kinds of sins, original sin and actual sin, which means the sin that man commits in this life. Christianity thought that the root of all human crimes, disasters, sufferings and death, come from Adam and Eve, because they eat the forbidden fruit, thus violating the Gods will. Besides this, there is many examples delight the audiences eyes: Adams Rib, the Silence of the Lamb, Eye for Eye, the First Blood, etc.1.2.3 Aesthetic FunctionSimilar to other literature texts, the aesthetic function of a movie title is also important. Aesthetics means the sense of beauty and impels audiences to go to the cinema. Though we cannot expect each title to bear much aesthetic function in only a few words, it is what we should not ignore in movie title translation.In his A Textbook of Translation, Newmark points out that language is aimed to please the humans minds, not only through its actual or imagined sound, but also through its metaphors. The rhythm, balance and contrasts of sentences, clauses and words also play their parts. As the art of language, the aesthetic values of movie title are generally reflected in its form, sound effect, force, rhythm and the application of rhetorical devices. From the previous analysis, we can see the artistic effects of the employment of rhetorical devices to movie titles. For example, when we use simile and metaphor, we can help the audience associate the memory with the exact movie, which has the same function to deepen audiences to understand by vividly revealing the theme of the movie. Repetition may lay emphasis on the subject or the object of the whole movie, thus it seems to be very beneficial to leave deep impression on the audience with the methods. Besides, the rhythm, color and force of the words and vivid image it reflects can also add elegance and power to the title.A carefully designed movie title can well perform the aesthetic function, creating such beauty as phonetic beauty and imaginational beauty. Generally speaking, the application of alliteration can create phonetic beauty, for instance, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, etc. Sometimes, in English Chinese translation of movie titles, the Chinese four-character phrases, economical in wording but expressive in meaning, also play an important part in achieving great artistic effect. A case in point is the Chinese version碧血黄沙for the American movie Blood and Sand (2010). If it is translated into“血和沙”， the audience cannot enjoy any visual beauty of the title. By contrast, version碧血黄沙，by using the color words“碧”and“黄”to modify the blood and sand, can well cater to the psychology of the Chinese audience.1.2.4 Commercial FunctionNowadays, it is very common that a movie, especially the hot hit made by Hollywood, costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Movie-making, as a kind of mental product, goes through the same production period as other commodities do: producing, advertising, releasing and consuming the movie. For this reason, it is easy to find that if a movie gets high box office, the movie company would earn enough profits, otherwise, it would sustain losses or even go bankrupt.According to Newmark, “the term vocative is used in the sense of calling upon the readership to act, think or feel, in fact to react in the way intended by the text” Peter Newmark. 2001: A Textbook of Translation, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, P.41. The commercial function includes the informative function and the aesthetic function at certain level. Since the target of movie titles is to draw the audience and arouse their interests, the audiences firstly have to get some background knowledge about the movie. Secondly, a movie title can be appellative enough by performing its aesthetic function. The audience is supposed to receive aesthetic pleasure from the title. When the audiences are faced with such carefully designed movie titles, they would be aesthetically entertained and accordingly their curiosity could be easily conjured up. The commercial function of movie titles also consists of touching the heartstrings of the audience by means of the charm of the language, that is, brevity, smoothness and vividness. Compare the following movie titles:Earthquake惊魂夺命vs.地震Piano钢琴别恋vs.钢琴You Cant Take It With You浮生若梦vs.你无法带走In the above examples, the first versions sounds better than the second ones, because they display the audience either by creating some kind of suspense atmosphere, or by giving the audience more room for their own imagination. Whats more, the first versions are more closely related to Chinese audiences habit upon language.2. Brief introduction of Skopos TheoryIt is an approach to translation proposed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Reiss & Vermeer. Skopos theory stresses the inter-actional, pragmatic aspects of translation, arguing that the shape of title translation should be determined by the function or “skopos” that it is intended to fulfill in the target context. Reiss & Vermeer formulate this principle into two skopos rules: “an interaction is determined by (or is a function of) its purpose”, and “the skopos can be said to vary according to the recipient”. From these principles it follows that the translator should use the translation strategies which are most appropriate to achieve the purpose for which title translation is intended, irrespective of whether they are considered to be the “standard” way to proceed in a particular translation context; in a short word, when producing a title translation “the end justifies the means”. An awareness of the requirements of the skopos “expands the possibilities of translation, increases the range of possible translation strategies, and releases the translator from the corset of an enforced and hence often meaningless literalness” 2.1 Four stages of Skopos Theory As early as 1971，Katharina Reiss introduced a functional category into her “objective approach to translation criticism”. In her book Possibilities and Limits of Translation Criticism, taking equivalence as her basis, Reiss develops a model of translation criticism based on the functional relationship between source and target texts. According to Reiss, the ideal translation would be one “in which the aim in the target language is equivalence as regards the conceptual content, linguistic form communicative function of a source language text” Christiane Nord, 2004: Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press,P.9. However, she also knew that real life presented situations where equivalence was not possible and, in some cases, not even desired due to the specifications of the “translation belief”. Therefore, her objective approach to translation criticism allows for certain exceptions from the equivalence requirement. “One exception is when the target text is intended to achieve a purpose or function instead of the original. Another exception is when the target text addresses an audience different from the intended readership of the original.” Christiane Nord, 2004: Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained, Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press,P.9 That is to say, the target text has a specific group of target addresses other than that of the original. Both exceptions have allowed the functional perceptive in the translation process to overrule the equivalence standards. The translators can no longer only rely on features derived from source-text origin but has to judge whether the target text is functional in terms of the translation context. In this case, for Reiss, all the types of translation may be justified in particular circumstances, and then functional equivalence is no longer regarded as the normal aim of translation.Hans Vermeer, a student of Reiss, has gone much further in trying to fill the gap between theory and practice. His most distinguished theory is Skopos Theory, which was developed as the foundation for a general theory of translation, dealing with specific languages and cultures. Since translation involves the transfer of communicative verbal and non-verbal signs from one language into another, Vermeer thinks translation is a kind of human action, which is defined as intentional, purposeful behavior that occurs in a given situation. Thats how Vermeer defines his theory Skopos Theory, a theory of purposeful action. Furthermore, since situations are integrated with cultures, any evalu