TRANSLATION TRANSFORMATIONS AS A MEANS OF RENDERING ENGLISH FILM TITLES INTO UKRAINIAN

Abstract

The article deals with the study of translation transformations as a means of translating English film titles into Ukrainian. The topicality of the research is determined by the fact that cinema is constantly evolving, and every year hundreds and even thousands of films are created in the world, which require adequate translation into Ukrainian as a means of acquainting Ukrainian-speaking viewers with foreign language film culture. Since a film title is the first thing the viewer encounters, and it often depends on the title whether the viewer wants to attend it, film titles need special attention during the translation process. Film titles are characterized by the concise structure and possess features that are inherent in names as independent units of language. Moreover, film titles have similar textual features to aphorisms and proverbs. Thus, a fundamentally similar translation approach is applied. The film title recreated in translation must be no less significant and vivid than the one in the source language. Therefore, the translator needs to successfully choose the method of translation. Rendering film titles in translation is also complicated by their stylistic diversity – these units include bookish vocabulary, colloquial and poetic words and combinations, titles may contain excerpts from songs, works of art, as well as proper names, realia that may be incomprehensible for the viewer belonging to another culture. Despite the fact that a significant number of English film titles can be rendered into Ukrainian by using literal translation, the study reveals that this procedure often requires the use of translation transformations – lexical (transliteration, practical transcription), lexical and semantic (differentiation, generalization, concretization, modulation), grammatical (grammatical replacements, addition, omission), and lexical and grammatical ones (antonymous translation, integral transformation). With the help of such transformations, one can move from the source language units of film titles to the units in the translation according to the linguistic level at which the differences between the source language and the target language occur, and create a film title in the target language that will interest the viewer and be directly related to the content or idea of the film itself.