Though This Be Adaptation, Yet There Is Method in’t . Film Re-titling for Spanish Viewers

Abstract

An extensive hermeneutic and comparative literary tradition allows us to consider adaptation as a translator’s domestication (naturalization) device, which is welcomed by a readership lacking access to structurally or historically remote languages. However, when it comes to tangible languages (e.g., English as lingua franca ), the hypothesis of adaptation as a publisher’s policy is an equally fascinating angle from which the evolution of this concept can be examined in such phenomena as the translation of film titles. The aim of this article is to compare four historic stages in film re-titling in Spain, its features and evolution. In the 1960s, adaptation and free translation were the main procedures, and in the 1970s, still characterized by a firm policy of domestication , re-titlers continued to use them, no longer so much on political, religious grounds, but rather in response to marketing criteria. Although free translation and adaptation were still preferred in the 1990s, literal translation and even non-translation came into their own. The 2000s brought a foreignizing tendency through the non-translation procedure, that is, conservation of English titles. For this analysis, I have used a corpus of 140 titles from the 1990s and 1,953 titles from the 2000s, as well as conclusions drawn from research on previous periods.