Xin
Once a friend complained to me that he felt at a disadvantage compared with his Korean friends when talking about movies with other international students in English. His Korean friends could immediately get the idea that people were talking about the movie “The Bourne Identity”, while he couldn’t when hearing the name of the movie. And he didn’t, for a single second, relate the name “The Bourne Identity” with the movie, even though he had seen it before. Only after others mentioned the cast and the plot did he realize that “That’s the movie you guys are talking about”.
I know it may sound a bit weird that he had seen the movie but he was unable to recognize it from the name. But the reason lies in the translation. “The Bourne Identity” was translated into “谍影重重” in Chinese, which is one of the best example of English-Chinese free translation. “谍” means espionage; “影”means shadow; “重重” means that there is layer upon layer. So put together, this four characters create a very poetic and vivid scene that there are many different identities of the main character. However, for my friend who didn’t know the English name of the movie, it can be difficult to tell that “The Bourne Identity” and “谍影重重” refer to the same thing.
But things are a lot easier for his Korean friends. Since Korean is a phonogram, words from other languages can be easily transcribed into Hangul, greatly keeping the sound from the source language. For example, “The Bourne Identity” is written as “본 아이덴티티” in Korean, which almost sounds identical to the English version. And it is also true of many other English-Korean translations for movie, tv show, book names, etc.
To summarize, a free translation like “谍影重重” helps keep the meaning of the source language but makes it difficult to relate between the source language and the target language. A transliteration like “본 아이덴티티” helps maintain the phonetic elements of the source language while eliminating the meaning. I’m curious that in your language, how do people translate the names of movies? Do you think it’s better to adopt a method of free translation or a method of transliteration?
Xin! The translation of film titles has been a longstanding joke among Montreal pals! We LOVE seeing “bring it on” translated to “le tout pour le tout” and “Wedding crashers” translated to “Garçons sans honneur”. When citing these translation gems to one another we tend to render them in a very Français-de-France accent, although the films themselves now often benefit from not only translation but also Localization – a specialization that has grown exponentially thanks to the video game industry and which seeks to make accent, dialect and all manner of variant as local as possible; not only comprehensible but immersive, linguistically speaking (ex: I recall growing up with a Homer Simpson whose pronunciation of even the word “Bart!” was recognizably Québecois) I love this idea you share of the option of conveying either the feeling of the film or the phonetics of the english title – what a fun translation challenge! In an effort to learn Spanish I have been trying to watch more series with subtitles and recently followed a recommendation to watch “Casa de papel” (a clever title referring to plot around the heist of the Spanish mint). I was significantly less excited to continue watching “money heist” once switching back to my Canadian Netflix account. titles matter.