An analysis of the Strategies Applied for Translating the Titles of the Bestseller Films from English into Arabic

Abstract

This research highlights and analyses the strategies applied when translating the titles of bestseller films from English into Arabic; the rationale looks specifically at domestication and foreignization for investigating the translation of the film titles. Three research questions are posed and addressed; four research aims are specified, mainly focusing on investigating the domestication and foreignization approaches. The corpus of the current study consists of a hundred film titles. The film titles are translated following either domestication or the foreignization strategies taking into account the linguistic, stylistic, and cultural aspects of the film titles. The film title translations are then classified based on the strategies applied for their translation. The research applies both a quantitative research design methodology to assess the translation of film titles and a qualitative method that involved the application of techniques fostering the researcher`s understanding of various attitudes and perspectives. The study utilized four film databases whereby twenty-five films were selected from each database. The findings demonstrated that 83% of the film titles investigated in this paper were translated applying the foreignization domestication strategy and that 17% were translated following the domestication strategy.