‘No Revolutionary Roads please, we’re Turkish’: The translation of film titles as an object of translation research

Abstract

This paper endeavours to promote further research into the relatively neglected field of film title translation by highlighting the fascinating range of factors and agents (including not just translators) that help determine the names used to market films imported into a country. As a survey article, it cannot dwell on all the variables that shape the choice of such titles but instead focuses on five: the diversity of translation tactics available; the influnce of the cultural background of the target audience; local patterns and conventions with regards to title translation; commercial considerations and the techniques they engender; and the impact of the international process and business relations from which translated film titles emerge. To illustrate these factors and to lend the paper a comparative and international perspective, the article draws on data from two countries on the margins of Europe, Turkey and Slovenia, who (albeit in different proportions) are heavily dependent on imported films, especially from the USA: it analyses a parallel corpus of film titles from the year 2009 and incorporates the findings from a questionnaire completed by professionals involved in the translation of titles in these two territories.

Translation of Mobile Game Titles: Trends and Implications

“…Instead, we have picked the dominant strategy which, we believe, reflects the nature of the title under inspection. While defining the strategies, we have borrowed from Chaume (2020) and Ross (2013) strategies appropriate for the data we have. After defining the strategy for each title, we have looked for any connection with other variables such as the founding year of the studios, the cities where they operate, their approximate employee count, and the publishing year of the games.…”

“…For our sample, their classifications would fall short and some categories would be impractical even if we try to adapt them. In their stead, we propose a hybrid of classifications provided by Ross (2013) and Chaume for film titles (Chaume, 2020, pp. 129-131).…”

Translating film titles: between language conversion and name coinage

“…When film titles do make it to the limelight of specialised studies, they are approached mainly with respect to "categorising and illustrating the procedures used in translating (mostly American) foreign titles" (Ross 2013: 247) into Chinese (Lu 2009;Ding 2016), French (Negro Alousque 2015), Polish (Surdyk and Urban 2016), Romanian (Bugheşiu 2020), Russian (Gudeleva and Sudarkina 2017;Ermolenko et al 2020;Krasina and Moctar 2020), Spanish (e.g. Martí andZapater 1993, Santaemilia-Ruiz andSoler-Pardo 2014), and Turkish (Ross 2013). One cannot overlook the tendency towards interdisciplinarity in analyses which deal with the translation of film titles in connection with cognitive linguistics (Peña-Cervel 2016), relevance theory (Díaz-Pérez 2014; Negro Alousque 2015), and advertising (Yu 2018), to name but a few.…”