SOME DIFFICULTIES OF TRANSLATING FILM TITLES (THE CASE STUDY: ENGLISH, RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN LANGUAGES)

Abstract

Nowadays cinema is one of the most demanded fields of our life. The popularity of each film is largely determined by its title. The title represents the main idea of the film in summary form. However, translators don’t always pay enough attention to the translation of the film titles and sometimes they even neglect the most important principles of the title’s relevance to the content of a movie which causes misrepresentation of the content and wrong interpretation of the idea of the artwork.

Translation of а film titles poses certain difficulties for а translator. Amongst the main difficulties are linguistic and cultural aspect, peculiarities of structure of different languages, the difference in aims of translation, title expressiveness and so on.

The title as one of the essential parts of an artwork when translated reflects the general tendencies of translation procedure and is often distinguished by various changes characterizing both the peculiarities of different linguistic and stylistic systems and the differences in cognitive processes associated with the specific perception and transmission of certain "alien" facts, events or activities. It is possible to highlight 3 main strategies which help the translator to make an adequate translation of a cinema title. The first strategy refers to direct translation of titles.

It is used for the titles which do not contain any untranslatable culturally specific realities. The second strategy concerns transformation of the title. Title transformations in the target text have been studied from the standpoint of cognitive processes, the specificity of the world picture reflected in the artwork. Film titles are translated by expanding cognitive information with the help of replacing or adding lexical elements. The essence of the third strategy is replacement of film titles. Among the reasons of such replacements we can name impossibility of transferring the internal form of the English name and necessity of genre adaptation.