Underlying Cultural Conceptualizations in Serbian Film Titles and Their Translations into English

The chapter deals with underlying cultural conceptualizations in Serbian film titles, as well as with the retained or reformulated conceptualizations in their translations into English. A film title is a form of paratext which serves as an intermediary between the film itself and the audience and, as such, with its identificational, informative, esthetic, and appellative functions, it is a crucially important element in the cultural reception and marketing of films, especially when it comes to its cultural adaptation for the foreign target audience. The theoretical framework of the study is primarily based on Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian, 2011, 2015, 2017), underpinned by notions from Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Initially, titles will be discussed from within paratextual theory (e.g., Kolstrup, 1996; Mahlknecht, 2016) and from cultural and contextual viewpoints on translation (e.g., Newmark, 1999; Nida, 1993). The methodology of qualitative analysis is applied to a list of about 150 culture-specific and culturally relevant film titles, selected from a 350-item register of titles of feature-length Serbian films and their official English translations. The results of the analysis show that, primarily through the strategies of cultural contextual adaptation or direct translation, and within the framework of audience-based approach, most of the newly created titles in English aim to achieve a balance between, on the one hand, retaining distinctly Serbian cultural conceptualizations and, on the other, if deemed appropriate, adapting them to the collective cultural expectations of the receiving audience, also bearing in mind, not less importantly, the structural and lexical constraints and requirements of the target language.