Film Titles Research Articles

Application of the Concept of Defamiliarization in Translation Studies: Case Studies of the Translation of Film Titles

As more and more foreign films stream into China, the importance of translation of film titles is becoming obvious. A good film title can not only convey the theme of a film, but also grab the attention and inspire the aesthetic emotion of the audience. The aim of defamiliarization theory is to evoke the aesthetic emotion of people which has been widely used in the translation of film titles. Yet some translations of film titles decrease the defamiliarization effect and present audience with more familiar content. This thesis probes into the application of “defamiliarization” in translation studies, summarizes the methods of translating film titles and discusses the issues of defamilarization degree, hoping to provide new ideas of translating film titles.

The Role of Cognitive Operations in the Translation of Film Titles

The translation of film titles is not simply a linguistic matter, i.e. a transfer of words from one language to another language that looks for the most appropriate equivalent. It is determined by other factors such as the cultural component and the aim to catch the audience's attention, which explain the use of translation techniques other than literal translation and zero translation. The present paper seeks to show the role of cognitive operations such as those proposed by Ruiz de Mendoza and Galera (2014) in the translation of English film titles into Spanish and French. We have gathered a corpus of 100 English titles and the corresponding Spanish and French titles. The comparative analysis suggests that, although the original titles are often kept in the other languages or literally translated, sometimes the translation is accounted for in terms of five cognitive operations: expansion, reduction, strengthening, mitigation or parametrization.

Film Title Sequences and Widescreen Aesthetics

Abstract

What’s in a name? The art of movie titling

Similarly to more conventional products, films have to be given names to make them more distinguishable and, very importantly, marketable. Film titles are the one means by which both producers and potential movie ticket buyers may refer to particular films. To make film titling as effective as possible, marketers do not choose random phrases but rather make sure to include informative and highly connotative words, combine them to form recognizable structures, and present them in intriguing and telling fonts. These measures are taken in order to provide the potential moviegoer with as much advance information as possible by linking the films in question to a certain genre through their titles. The article shows just how many cues may be detected in film titles as a means of effective film marketing to make the product more easily graspable and desirable.

Outside of the Classroom: How to Show a Great Film at Mason!

Screening films outside of the traditional classroom setting is a useful supplement to what an instructor may cover in their courses. Also, public viewings create a better sense of community at George Mason University. However, knowing where to begin and what steps to take to organize a screening might seem confusing and expensive. In this poster session, Laura and Mika'il will show you both how to find films and how to organize a screening. This is a useful how-to for Mason community members, whether they are faculty, involved in student organizations, or just plain cinephiles. The presenters will provide an overview of how to begin the process with brainstorming, where to look for film titles, why university copyright policies must be upheld, how to estimate potential costs, who to contact for co-sponsorship, and what offices might provide assistance.

“Between Creation and Devouring”: Southern Women Writers and the Politics of Motherhood

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 1989, American audiences flocked to see the sweet southern dream that was Steel Magnolias. The film follows a multigenerational group of women through the wedding, marriage, pregnancy, and death of the young and beautiful Shelby, played by Julia Roberts in an Oscar-nominated performance. Female relationships are the center of this movie, and these big-haired, drawling matriarchs love each other fiercely. M'Lynn, played by Sally Field, donates a kidney to her diabetic daughter Shelby, who fatally chooses motherhood over her own life, deciding to have a child even though she knows her body cannot survive the stress of childbirth and rearing. The film's title is drawn from M'Lynn's discussion of motherhood and the death of her only daughter: find it amusing. Men are supposed to be made out of steel or something ... I realize as a woman how lucky I am. I was there when that wonderful creature drifted into my life and I was there when she drifted out. It was the most precious moment of my life. (1) While the paternal figures in the movie are mostly present for comic relief, mothering is shown as serious business. Steel Magnolias traffics in stereotypes, the most prominent of which is the southern self-sacrificing mother who finds ultimate fulfillment in her children. This regional portrayal of selfless motherhood replicated the pronatalist national culture of the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century--one that is still prevalent today. All too often when motherhood makes the news or the big screen, we are confronted with impossible ideals of full-time motherhood: attachment moms who breastfeed, co-sleep, and literally wear their babies day in and day out, or helicopter helpers who hover, chopper-like, ready to swoop in to do their kids' homework. These women have little time for anything other than mothering, and their presence in the media shames those mothers who can't, don't, or won't spend their days monitoring their children's every hiccup. For those of us who have read Backlash, Susan Faludi's bestselling book about antifeminism, each of these news stories should sound familiar, echoing the New Traditionalist movement of the 1980s in which women allegedly ditched their careers, leapt joyously onto the track, and cocooned at home with their children (a movement that itself imitated the nineteenth-century middle-class cult of domesticity). (2) It is worth noting that our culture has not always been so clearly divided on definitions of good and bad motherhood. Past eras have featured unashamed, public acknowledgement of the complexity of maternity. Specifically, the politics of motherhood have changed drastically in the past two generations. In the 1970s, second-wave feminists provided us with a vibrant, complex analysis of the wide variety of maternal experiences. My children cause me the most exquisite suffering, Adrienne Rich, a major contributor to this feminist analysis of motherhood, told readers on the very first page of her widely read Of Woman Born (1976). The reigning feeling of most mothers toward the experience and of motherhood was, according to Rich, ambivalence. (3) Yet just a few years after Rich wrote those words, the neoconservative backlash--a reaction to, among other things, second-wave feminism's assault on traditional gender roles--took a firm stranglehold on American culture. Despite very public feminist critiques that began in the 1970s, maternal struggles quickly became a taboo subject. By the 1990s, even many feminists at least partially internalized the neotraditional myth that made criticism of the institution nearly impossible. Women, according to this myth, were incomplete without children, and Good Mothers devoted their entire beings--body, soul, time, and mind--to their children. Those mothers who did not fall within the narrow definition of the mommy myth--single, working, or minority mothers--were, of course, Bad Mothers. …

Language, region and cinema: Translation as politics in Ek Duuje Ke Liye

Abstract Language articulates cultural distinction and difference in a variety of ways in India’s diverse cinematic traditions. In mainstream Bombay cinema, language has been deployed to assert the hegemony of Hindi and to cast Hindi-speaking North Indian subjects as quintessential national subjects. This assertion of linguistic and cultural privilege runs counter to the fact that film-making in India has always entailed a host of multilingual and cross-regional exchanges, from producing remakes and double versions to dubbing film dialogues. This article uses G. N. Devy’s concept of ‘translation consciousness’ to demonstrate how Ek Duuje Ke Liye/For Each Other, a Hindi film produced by South Indian film-makers, challenges the hegemony of both Hindi and Bombay cinema as an industry. In moving deftly across multiple tongues and cultural forms – from various iterations of Hindi to Bharatanatyam to classic film titles – EDKL urges us to embrace a more playful attitude towards linguistic and regional identity. Attending to the politics of language and sound in this particular film, and in Indian film history more broadly, also allows us to rethink the relationship between the ‘national’ and the ‘regional’ in film studies as a discipline.

Notes towards a semiotics of kinetic typography

This paper traces the development of a new semiotic mode, kinetic typography. Kinetic typography began with the experiments of filmmakers like Len Lye and Norman McLaren. Later, film title designers like Saul Bass and Pablo Ferro drew on the shapes of letters with inventive metaphors – serifs, for instance could make letters walk, because they can stand for shoes as they are elongated horizontals on which something stands. In Saul Bass’ titles for Hitchcock's Psycho, the splitting of letters became a metaphor for the split mind of the film's main character. Such inventions eventually became part of a lexicon of clichés drawn on by designers across the world. Eventually, researchers and software designers began to formalize and systematize the language of kinetic typography, and the fruit of their work is now widely available, not only to specialists, but also to anyone who uses PowerPoint or Adobe AfterEffects, even though users may not always be aware of the lexico-grammatical rules which underlie the menus they choose from. And computers, being agnostic as to the kind of “objects” their operations operate on, apply these grammars to letters as well as other graphic forms, thus consolidating the multimodality of the language of movement. The second part of the paper discusses these formalizations, drawing on the kinetic design literature. Based on M.A.K. Halliday's transitivity theory, it sketches the outlines of a systemic grammar of movement that can make the meaning potential of kinetic typography explicit. The paper concludes with an analysis of art works created by David Byrne which use PowerPoint as a medium. Using PowerPoint's relatively simple movement grammar, Byrne has nevertheless succeeded in using movement creatively, giving us a glimpse of a future of creative writing which has kinetic typography at its very centre.

Transferring of Implied Sense by the Translation of English Film Titles in Russian as a Problem of Translation Harmony in Film Discourse

В данной статье проблема передачи подтекста при переводе названий кинофильмов рассматривается с точки зрения модели гармоничного перевода. Выделяются следующие уровни гармоничности при переводе кинодискурса: дисгармония, адекватный перевод, эквивалентный перевод и гармоничный перевод. Передача подтекста является одним из условий гармоничного перевода, невыполнение данного условия ведёт к дисгармонии. Экспликация подтекста становится средством достижения переводческой гармонии. Для гармоничного перевода названия фильма в ряде случае необходимо учитывать и компенсировать лингвокультурные различия.

How Trainee Translators Analyse Lexico-Grammatical Patterns

Abstract: In this study, we examine the ability of advanced students of specialised translation to identify and analyse 'generic collocations' in a corpus of specialised multilingual texts (mostly technical or scientific texts in English, French and German). In general, we find that our students attach much importance to frequently-occurring 'clusters' or 'n-grams'. However the students find it difficult to see these fragments as productive patterns of wording, or to assign a rhetorical function to them. This rather fixed view of phraseology suggests that there may be shortcomings in the way that we as teachers conceptualise and problematise the concept of the 'lexicogrammatical pattern' for our students. In the second part of this study, we suggest a different way of identifying and conceptualising phraseological phenomena using the metalanguage of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG).Keywords: Discourse Function, Generic Collocation, Lexico-Grammatical Pattern, Phraseology, Systemic Functional GrammarIntroductionFor many years now, an increasing number of linguists and educationalists have argued the case for a 'corpus-informed' approach to language learning, based on the analysis of large-scale text archives. Following this trend, a more central place has been given to the study of idiomatic phrases, collocational patterns and other regularities of wording, as encapsulated by the term 'phraseodidactics' (Gonzalez Rey, 2005; 2008). Although phraseology as a subject has not yet become a central feature of the language syllabus, it is certainly the case that some key notions such as 'collocation' have become very widespread, most notably in areas such as second-language acquisition (Hasselgren, 2002), textbased terminology (Pavel, 1993) and Natural Language Processing (Williams, 1998; 2003). One of the reasons for the relative success of 'collocation' in these areas must lie in the way the notion is conceptualised. We would suggest that there are essentially two approaches to the notion within the field of phraseology: the phraseoriented and the pattern-oriented approach. For the phrase-oriented approach (adopted by many mainstream phraseologists, lexicologists and analysts who are interested in language as system), the key units of analysis are 'idiomatic phrases,' 'proverbs' or 'stereotypes', that is to say exceptional or idiosyncratic sequences which are pragmatically 'marked' can thus often be easily identified in a given text. Such phraseological units clearly have an important rhetorical role to play in a variety of text-types belonging to the general language (horoscopes, popular journalism, film titles, etc.). In contrast, for the pattern-oriented approach (adopted by many corpus linguists, lexicographers and those concerned with language as discourse), the key units of analysis are 'collocational frameworks', 'lexical patterns', 'clusters' and so on. In contrast to idiomatic expressions, these constructions are often routine formulae and fragments of expressions which often attract little attention, but which often make up the most typical wording of a particular genre or texttype (for a review of this approach, see for example Hunston and Francis, 2000; Frath and Gledhill, 2005; Legallois and Francois, 2006).We would suggest that it is this second, patternoriented, approach to phraseology has particular relevance to a range of applied and academic contexts, most notably in courses on language engineering, terminology, technical communication and so on. Let us take a specific example from our own teaching context: at the Universite Paris Diderot, we teach phraseology and corpus linguistics to first year and second students who are for the most part being trained to work in the language industries (including document design, text mining, technical writing, specialised translation, etc.). (The course we are referring to here is usually known by its French abbreviation: M2 ILTS, Industries de la langue et traduction specialisee = 'Language industries and specialised translation'). …

Environmental Innocence and Slow Violence

Any day now, says teacher in Benh Zeitlins 2012 film, Beasts of Southern Wild, fabric of universe is coming unraveled. Ice caps gonna melt, water's gonna rise, and everything south of levee is going under. Y'all better learn how to survive now. The film poses a nearly unthinkable, yet all too present, question: how does one prepare a small child for a future marked by imminent environmental collapse? The scene of impossible pedagogy stages paradoxical relation between child, so widely theorized as sign of futurity, and her place at what Bill McKibben has called the end of nature (Edelman 2004; Stockton 2009; Sheldon 2013; McKibben 1989). In this essay, I wish to suggest that as a temporal structure and as a form of absence, deeply informs environmental representation, causing it to make special claims on figure of child. I am especially concerned to illuminate negative or nonpresent dimensions of innocence and their affordances for psychic apprehension of environmental harm. As Anne-Lise Francois has observed, privileged environmental figure is precisely one of nonimpact, of leaving no trace-a figure of environmental innocence bound up in Romantic childhood that literature of environmental advocacy works to disallow, asserting instead, and in face of what Francois has identified as nature's withheld response to violence, a call to responsibility (2014, 6). Environmental genres work to expose environmental innocence-a nonculpable earliness or having-time-as a fiction to be strongly countered by a sense of urgency (in reality, we're out of time). Building on Robin Bernstein's analysis of innocence, I suggest that such efforts rest on racialized temporalities of both anticipation (not-yet) and foreclosure (already- over). Environmental innocence plays out against a long-standing shadow drama of specifically environmental black culpability seated in figure of black child. I am especially concerned to illuminate negative or nonpresent dimensions of innocence and their affordances for psychic apprehension of environmental harm. I take Beasts of Southern Wild as an exemplary object for illuminating deep interchanges between environmental innocence and racial innocence by situating it in a longer trajectory of stagings of black childhood, from William Blake poem cited in film's title to Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.Beasts of Southern Wild, filmed in midst of ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill cleanup, is a self-consciously post-Hurricane Katrina environmental narrative set on an outlying Louisiana island that Zeitlin has described as literally forgotten by system (Mohney 2012; Gallot 2012). Through subjective centering of a very young child, Hushpuppy (Quevenzhane Wallis), film seeks to render visualizable what Rob Nixon has called unspectacularizable-indeed, almost imperceptible-slow violence of environmental destruction. Why is a child's subjectivity key to this visualization? And why must that child be a black girl who is frequently conspicuously misidentified by both age and gender? I wish to suggest that film's temporalities of realized formally through adoption of Hushpuppy's fantastical consciousness, depend on a racialized logic of childhood-a logic that film attempts to transcend but ultimately only reinscribes. Yet this is not a one-way street: film's logic also opens out for us environmental forms already present in conceptions of racial revealing wider consequences for environmental genres and representation of slow violence.Temporalities of InnocenceFrom concept of Anthropocene, geological period of humans' mark upon earth, to its calls to urgent action, environmental discourses are deeply implicated in negotiations of time-too much time to comprehend, too little time in which to act (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007; Nixon 2011,12). …

Exposure to smoking in films and smoking behaviour among Norwegian 15- to 20-year-olds: a cross-sectional study

Studies from several countries have revealed significant effects of exposure to smoking in films on smoking behaviour and attitudes among adolescents. This study presents the first findings from the Scandinavian cultural region on this topic. With the objective to test for significant adjusted relationships between exposure to smoking in films and established smoking among 15- to 20-year-old respondents, and susceptibility to smoking among non-smokers in the same age group, a cross-sectional study was conducted in June 2008. 807 Norwegian adolescents and young adults answered a web-based questionnaire. Exposure to smoking in films is estimated by asking the respondents if they had seen films from a list of 56 popular film titles of both local and foreign origin from 2007 and 2008. Associations of exposure and smoking behaviour are tested in two logistic regression models. Respondents with the highest exposure to film smoking are more likely to be established smokers than those with no exposure (adjusted odds ratios=2.22, confidence interval=1.04-4.77). Among non-smokers, those with highest exposure to smoking in films are more likely to be susceptible to smoking than those with no exposure (adjusted odds rations=1.55, confidence interval=0.93-2.56). Film smoking is significantly associated with smoking susceptibility and established smoking among Norwegian adolescents and young adults.

When We Go to War: Multimodality and Film Title Design

AbstractFilm titles are distinctive paratextual artefacts that while supporting and normally prefiguring a film or television series, orchestrate unique modes of address into an expression of identity. These multimodal texts have a bifurcate function. First they establish the film’s title and list the primary creative and management team behind the production. In addition, they can also become unique expressions that interpret the ethos of a film. As such they increasingly stand as appreciable design works in their own right. This article considers the design process and eventual form of a 45-second title sequence developed for the six-part television drama series

Translating film titles

In Spain, as in the rest of the non-Anglophone Western world, English-language film titles have become texts (or paratexts) of great cultural importance. The titles of the films that one may encounter in Western cinema can be considered, on the one hand ephemeral, elusive, and inconsequential. However, on the other hand, despite their clear irrelevance, film titles are considered to be the genuine contemporary cultural texts, for their continued presence in the media and for their evocative nature: an important marketing tool. Moreover, the result of what happens when film titles are translated into other languages and cultures has always intrigued the audience: this is perhaps indicative of the vast universe of translation studies. The differences between languages are palpable, not only from a linguistic point of view but also from a pragmatic, historical or cultural standpoint. In this paper, we deal with the translation of Quentin Tarantino’s film titles into a number of European languages, including Spanish, Catalan, French and German. Quentin Tarantino’s films are controversial, self-reflexive and have acquired a significant recognition within popular culture. Most of the typologies employed so far have revolved around the notion of ‘fidelity” in the translation of film titles, and involving such strategies as literal translation, transposition, addition, etc. We wish to propose here another avenue for investigation: that of film-title translation as a complex (and globalised) rewriting phenomenon that benefits the commercial and ideological interests of the film industry.

Aquarius and Beyond: Thinking through the Counterculture

Aquarius and Beyond: Thinking through the Counterculture

Raymonde Provencher, director. Grace, Milly, Lucy . . . Child Soldiers.2010. 52 minutes. Canada/Uganda. Women Make Movies. $295.00.

Raymonde Provencher, director. Grace, Milly, Lucy.. . Child Soldiers. 2010. 52 minutes. Canada/Uganda. Women Make Movies. $295.00.Grace, Milly, Lucy . . . Child Soldiers is portrait of three Ugandan women who were captives and girl soldiers injoseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army. Grace of the film's title is Grace Akallo, co-author of Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda's Children (Chosen Books, 2007), founder of the NGO United Africans for Women and Children's Rights, and an accomplished international speaker on the themes of gender, youth, and militarism in Africa. Milly is Milly Auma, one of the four founders of Empowering Hands, Ugandan organization that offers community-based counseling to former abductees and displaced people. Lucy refers to Lucy Lanyero, woman about whom little is known beyond what appears in the film.The film opens on dark field of tall grasses with Grace's voice-over narrating the night of her abduction. Underneath, the soundtrack carries the mournful tones of string instruments and scattered insect songs, punctuated by the click-clack of an automatic weapon being loaded. We are told that Grace was student at St. Mary's College, Aboke, when militants launched late night raid and forced the schoolgirls to march barefoot into the bush, under threat of death by panga. Grace delivers terrifying retelling of how the schoolgirls were sorted into two categories: the small girls and the big girls. latter were allowed to leave following the desperate pleadings of one of the schoolteachers, while the small girls, Grace included, were fated to be left with the militants. Any thought of escape was vanquished with death threats against the would-be escapee or her friends. schoolgirls were told that if one member of the group of twenty-nine attempted to escape, the other twenty-eight would immediately be killed. About two weeks after her abduction, Grace learned firsthand just how precarious life had become. Just when the band of captives and keepers was about to enter into Sudan, one girl tried to escape but was caught. other girls were ordered to beat her to death and each picked up some small implement that she could use to put on convincing performance of brutality. Impatient with these schoolgirls who had not been fully transformed into girl soldiers, Grace tells us simply, The rebels hit her with an axe on the head. And she died.On the film's website (macubainternational.com), the director describes the work as a film on the fate of girl soldiers in Uganda. It would be more apt to say that it is memoir of girl soldiers and their postcaptivity lives. three girls stand in for three fates. In some ways, Grace, who was abducted as teenager and spent seven months in captivity, can be said to have formed the most successful postcaptivity life of the three. It is one that has taken her far away from the site of her childhood horrors to the rarefied halls of the United Nations and liberal colleges in Massachusetts. On the other extreme we have Lucy, who was abducted at age nine and spent ten years in captivity. In the film Lucy always appears to be two steps away from complete breakdown. She is tormented by mysterious sweats and evil spirits, requiring her to make numerous visits to the local herbalist. She is haunted by the actions of her past life, when she was known as Lance Corporal Lucy. But she seems to be also disturbed by subtly nagging pull to return to the bush. She is distrusted and kept at some distance by other former abductees who remembered the notorious Lance Corporal Lucy as mean and a hard person, as someone who took pleasure in discriminating between original LRA and those who were mere recruits.Milly was one of Lucy's co-wives in the harem of an fighter. She too was abducted at age nine and held in captivity for ten years. Her outcome or fate lies somewhere in the middle of the three. Like Lucy, she remains in Northern Uganda where she has to face the accusations and condemnations of those who were left behind-people like her new mother-in-law. …

Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome, eds. Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. viii + 371 pp. Figures and Illustrations. Preface and Acknowledgments. List of Contributors. General Index. Film Title Index. $80.00. Cloth. $30.00. Paper. $24.99. EBook.

Matthias Krings and Onookome Okome, eds. Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. viii + 371 pp. Figures and Illustrations. Preface and Acknowledgments. List of Contributors. General Index. Film Title Index. $24.99. EBook. - Volume 57 Issue 3

Étude sémiotique des techniques de traduction interlinguale

The scope of this paper is the semiotic study of the techniques of interlingual translation of French film titles into Greek. Firstly, approaching the film titles as advertisement slogans, we will examine if advertisement characteristics and functions are present into both the French and Greek film titles. Then, we will study the process of translation of connotations of the film titles and the role of non verbal semiotic systems such as numbering and punctuation in translation. Also, we will examine if translation techniques are influenced by extra-linguistic factors such as the period of film production, the film genre, diacritics, and the principle of economy of the words. If a relation does exist between translation techniques and extra-linguistic factors this could be used for a second, a semiotic reading.

The signification of visual text appeared in film title sequences of Saul Bass

The signification of visual text appeared in film title sequences of Saul Bass

Making cinelandia: American films and Mexican film culture before the golden age

A Note on Translations and Film Titles xi Prologo (Prologue) xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 Part I. The Yanqui Invasion 17 1. U.S. Motion Picture Companies Go South of the Border 19 2. American Movies, Mexican Modernity: The Cinema as a National Space 47 3. In Lola's House: Fan Discourse in the Making of Mexican Film Culture 85 Part II. Border Crossings 121 4. La Virgen and La Pelona: Film Culture, Border Crossing, and the Modern Mexican Woman 123 5. Denigrating Pictures: Censorship and the Politics of U.S. Film in Greater Mexico 154 6. Al Cine: Mexican Migrants Go to the Movies 180 Conclusion 215 Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Sources 223 Notes 225 Bibliography 279 Filmography 303 Index 309