Consequently, in order to make domestic audience understand and accept these foreign films better, the translation of English film has been increasingly important. In general, English film translation mainly consists of film title translation and subtitle translation. Film title as the first courier of a new film to the audience, whether it is correctly translated is a crucial factor determining the first impression the film leaves for the audience and their willingness to watch it.

 2. Diffrences of English Film Title Translation

For the same English film title, translators in China Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan have their own ways to deal with it, which usually makes the three version very distinguished from each other. There are mainly three kinds of these differences, namely, translating strategy, translating method and specific forms. 

2.1 Translating Strategy: Domestication and Foreignization

Domestication and foreignization, sometimes also called adaptation and alienation, are two important translating strategies which were formally presented by Lawrence Venuti in his book The Translator’s Invisibility in 1995. According to Venuti, these two terms can be traced back to Friedrich Schleiermacher, who put forward different methods of translation in his lecture in 1883, stated as “there are only two. Either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the author towards him”. (Venuti, 1995:37) In his book, Venuti gives a specific explanation of these two strategies, which is “domestication means bringing the foreign culture closely to the reader in the target culture, making the text recognizable and familiar. Foreignization on the other hand, means taking the reader over to foreign culture and making him or her see the differences”. Therefore, we may say that domestication is target-language-oriented translation which aims at making the translated text more intelligible and acceptable for the target text audience while foreignization is source-language-oriented translation which attempts to retain the foreignness of source language as much as possible.

Virtually translation is a cross-culture activity which is an important medium to promote cultural communication. However, distinctions of history, ideology, and living environment of different countries may result in cultural barriers. Domestication and foreignization are two ways translators use to reduce those barriers.