Translating film titles: between language conversion and name coinage

Abstract

The paper analyses the translation of film titles from English into Romanian in the context of globalisation and multiculturalism, from the perspective of translation studies, onomastics, semantics, and semiotics. With the help of concepts and precepts pertaining to the aforementioned fields, the research aims at exploring how certain film titles can be viewed as new names (novel linguistic signs) based on their specific semantic content and behaviour. Regardless of their lexical-semantic status, film titles prove to be cultural mediators, facilitating the communication of meaning (i.e., social, ethical, political, economic, etc. values) from the source language and culture to the target ones.