THE DELICATE ART OF MOVIE TITLE TRANSLATION

Title translation is of paramount importance for any work, particularly for movie titles. They are always the first thing that the audiences come to know about new movies. Therefore, a translator must be very accurate in his/her title translation. Nevertheless, some translated titles have no coherence whatsoever with the original title. Many movie-goers wonder why titles are often changed so radically when translated from one language into another. Unfortunately, titles are rarely translated word-for-word, but rather sense-for-sense to minimize the strangeness in the target language. Titles are changed for various other reasons such as to be more marketable by adding catchy words, to add clarity, to satisfy cultural and artistic purposes and so on. As it seems, translators have to rely rather on the entire work than on the original title alone in order to fully understand and value the title and to avoid such inaccurate title translations as of Mad Max that was literally translated into Russian as ‘ Безумный Макс '- Insane Max , surprisingly for quite a recent movie that was released in 2015. One of the major challenges in translating titles is words with double or triple meaning (polysemy). These titles are particularly difficult to translate. Therefore, the present article attempts to take a close look at some titles that have or haven't been changed. We go beyond the descriptive level by offering a principled account of translation strategies in terms of cognitive modelling as well as some of the reasons for these changes. This is a well known topic that has been discussed in many academic works, websites and forums.