Features of translation of English-language horror filmonyms into Russian and German

Abstract

The subject of the research of the article is the general features and specific features of the translation of horror discourse filmonyms from English into Russian and German. The object of the study is the original English-language and translated Russian- and German-language filmonyms of horror discourse. In our work, we will be interested in strategies and techniques for translating English-language horror discourse filmonyms, since the horror film genre is one of the most popular at the moment, and a large number of films are being released in English. When translating movie titles, a translator faces a number of difficulties and must solve them by choosing a translation technique and strategy. Often, the translation of a filmonym is accompanied by a shift in its leading function, or a change in the type of filmonym according to the peculiarities of its perception by the viewer. The work uses the continuous sampling method, comparative linguistic analysis of parallel filmonyms, as well as quantitative data processing methods. The research material was a sample including 150 original English-language horror-discourse filmonyms and their translation options into Russian and German. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the features of the translation of film names are studied in a comparative aspect using the example of Russian- and German-language horror discourse based on the material of the titles of films released over the past two decades. A methodology is being developed for a comparative study of the features of translating film names into different languages. As a result of the analysis, it was concluded that the domestication strategy of filmonyms is high-frequency; for German-language translated filmonyms, the use of a forenization strategy is much more typical. A feature of the German film distribution is the high frequency of combining two translation strategies, when the first forenized part of the filmonym is combined with domestication in the second part of the movie title after the dash sign. Due to the fact that German translated film names undergo less transformations, they are less characterized by a functional shift compared to translated film names in the Russian film distribution. When translated into Russian, preference is given to tonal-type filmonyms, which corresponds to the peculiarities of the horror genre.