Abstract
When we are looking at the books displayed in the window of a bookshop, what first catches the eye is the title. Titles pave the way to the text, even in a literal sense. In any case, they establish a first contact with a potential readership, informing them, for example, about the genre (novel, non-fiction, children’s book) or the content of the book, praising its qualities, and, if all this raises the readers’ interest, appealing to them to buy and later read the book, or even guiding their interpretation of the text. This shows how important it is that a title is apt to fulfil all these functions - an original title in its own culture, a translated title in the target culture. It is a well-known fact that translators do not normally have the last word in the process of deciding on the title of a book they have translated. Nevertheless, if they can offer good arguments for or against certain title formulations, they might at least be heard. At any rate, just pleading for a “faithful” translation of the original title will not do. There may be a lot of arguments - and not only linguistic ones - against a literal translation, with which translators have to be familiar. The following study is based on a corpus including titles of fictional, nonfictional and children’s books in English, German, French and Spanish. After justifying the classification as titles as texts, and even a genre with its own culture-specific conventions, it aims at showing the forms and functions of book titles in order to provide a sound foundation for their translation, discussing some of the problems derived from this functional perspective.
Highlights
Using the title of this paper again, we will see that the first sentence of the co-text does not substitute the topical noun mentioned in the title by a pronoun, which would be the appropriate way of establishing cohesion: Example (9) Title: Paving the way to the text: forms and functions of book titles in translation
If we look at the nominal simple titles more closely, we find that the pattern NP is most frequent in fictional book titles (11.8%), whereas it only represents 1.5% in nonfictional book titles, where NP&NP is the pattern with the highest frequency (20%), which only amounts to appr. 5% in fictional book titles
The main hypotheses of this paper were the following: ♦ titles are texts which are intended to achieve the same communicative functions as other texts; ♦ since titles are generally used for a particular set of functions, they can be regarded as a genre and, as such, show certain genre-typical structures which can be described with regard to their form, distribution, and frequency; ♦ these genre conventions are culture-specific; ♦ the study of these conventional features may be of help in the process of title translation or translation criticism; ♦ the methodology used for the analysis of title translation can serve as a paradigm for a functional translation of other texts or text types
Summary
We often ask ourselves (if we know the original) why the translation is not more (or less) literal — and why a particular translation that looks so different from the original still has such great impact (or vice versa). Readers are not aware of the fact that the title they are reading in a publisher’s catalogue or in a book review is a translation Even if they are, they will interpret any title on the basis of their intuitive knowledge about titles of certain book genres, which, is culture-specific. Nonfictional and children’s books are, often translated, as the catalogues of popular publishing houses clearly show, where translated and non-translated titles are listed alphabetically without any distinction. These catalogues seemed to provide suitable data for the study. Readers who are not familiar with the “déformation professionnelle” of translators or translation scholars are not even aware of reading a translation
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