Title translation in documentary films: a reception study

Titles have multiple functions, including attracting the audience to engage with the content. Maintaining these functions across languages and cultures poses challenges for translators. This study investigates the translation techniques employed in translating documentary film titles and examines the extent to which the resulting translations fulfill their referential and appellative functions from the target audience’s perspective. For that purpose, the research used mixed methods. First, a parallel corpus of 120 English and Arabic titles of documentary films from two online sources, namely Abu Dhabi National Geographic and Netflix, was analyzed to identify the translation techniques used to render them. Second, a survey was conducted to elicit feedback from potential audience on the topic clarity and appeal of a random sample of titles that represents the identified translation methods. Analysis results show that literal translation was the most frequently used technique, followed by adaptation, while the remaining instances were combinations of both direct and oblique translation methods. The survey results show a relation between clarity of topic in a title and its appeal, thus indicating a connection between its referential and appellative functions. The study will contribute to a deeper understanding of cross-cultural communication dynamics within the field of audiovisual translation.