The Role of Cognitive Operations in the Translation of Film Titles

The translation of film titles is not simply a linguistic matter, i.e. a transfer of words from one language to another language that looks for the most appropriate equivalent. It is determined by other factors such as the cultural component and the aim to catch the audience's attention, which explain the use of translation techniques other than literal translation and zero translation. The present paper seeks to show the role of cognitive operations such as those proposed by Ruiz de Mendoza and Galera (2014) in the translation of English film titles into Spanish and French. We have gathered a corpus of 100 English titles and the corresponding Spanish and French titles. The comparative analysis suggests that, although the original titles are often kept in the other languages or literally translated, sometimes the translation is accounted for in terms of five cognitive operations: expansion, reduction, strengthening, mitigation or parametrization.