TRANSLATION OF ENGLISH FEATURE FILM TITLES IN CROATIAN
TRANSLATION OF ENGLISH FEATURE FILM TITLES IN CROATIAN

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the challenges posed by English film titles and the translation strategies used to adapt them for the Croatian-speaking audience. The corpus consisted of 190 feature-length English-language film titles and their corresponding Croatian translations. They were then grouped according to the source-language challenges (puns and double meaning, character references, cultural references and idioms, ambiguity, wordplay by means of embedding the sequel number in the title, and intertextuality) and target-language strategies (using keywords indicative of the film genre or plot, proverbs, expanding the original meaning or making it more explicit, introducing intertextuality, partially translating the titles, and retaining only part of the original meaning). The analysis shows that while a part of the target-language titles in the corpus aim to familiarize the target-language audience with source-language structure and culture-bound elements, extra-linguistic factors affect the translation in over half of the instances. This points to the use of film titles as marketing devices.

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