Translating Movie Titles: Strategies Applied on Persian to English Cases

Abstract

Movies are significant art forms that can potentially reflect life, culture, world, or thought of a society and present it to another society. Movie titles are the indivisible part of the movies. Translating movie titles is an arduous activity owing to its leading role in movies. Foreign movies are rapidly translated from English to Persian, while translation of Persian movies to English still has not received much attention. Therefore, the present study attempts to investigate the translation of 64 Persian movie titles with the intention of analyzing translation strategies used. The model proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet was used as the theoretical framework of this study to check up on each strategy used for translation of these 64 Persian to English movie titles. The results show that the most frequent translation strategy is literal translation in the translation of movie title from Persian to English, which is in line with the results of English to Persian, or English to Chinese translation of movie titles which were done in other studies.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n20p2568