영화제목의 번역

A Study on the Translation of English Movies into Korean

The title of a movie is supposed to summarize and condense the content of the movie. The title should also be evocative and operative, working with its semantic value and connotations. Such traits of a movie title make its translation particularly difficult for the translator who can not resort to context to clarify or supplement the meaning. In other words, the translation of movie titles encompasses the task of not only giving it meaning bust also making it appealing and catchy to potential customers. Therefore, the translator is faced with a trick work of translating the message in a faithful but creative way. Based on this observation, this study collected 100 English movie titles and their Korean translations to discuss the dominant translation methods adopted by Korean translators. The translated methods are divided into 7 categories; free and localized translation; literal translation; partial translation; transliteration; new English title; original title + Korean counterpart. The finding of this study shows that free and localized titles outnumbers the other methods, while the literal translation of originals makes up only a small proportion of the collected data. The analysis and discussion highlights the importance of considering socio-cultural context surrounding the activity of translation.