Strategies for translating English filmonyms into Russian

Abstract

The subject of the research in the article is the peculiarities of the translation of filmonyms from English into Russian. The methods of comparative, semantic and pragmatic analysis with elements of cultural and stylistic analysis are used in the work. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that it is based on the material of parallel English- and Russian-language filmonyms released over the past two decades. The obtained results contribute to the development of translation studies and the theory of onyms. Choosing a strategy is one of the most important decisions of the translator which is associated with the linguistic features of the filmonym and the cultural specifics of the translation audience. The closer the cultures of native speakers of the original language and the target language are, the more opportunities there are for using forenization, a translation strategy in which the translator strives to preserve the content and the form of the original title. Forenization strategy was used to transmit 25.34% of the English-language filmonyms of the sample, which is significantly inferior to the number of filmonyms translated according to the domestication strategy, which make up 69.34% of the sample. The high frequency of the domestication strategy is explained by the fact that using translation transformations allows overcoming such difficulties in translating filmonyms as discordance of interlanguage equivalents, mismatch of meanings of similar words, undesirable associations with precedent phenomena, dysphemisms, the emergence of meanings that disorient the viewer, untranslatable wordplay. In the examples that make up 5.32% of the sample, the binomial translation construction of the onym was used; the forenized title of the film is included in the first part before the colon, and the second part is a variant of the name adapted as part of the domestication strategy.