ABSTRACT
Film titles are usually short, consisting of just a few words that sum up a cinematic text of almost a hundred minutes. Yet, the translation of such titles can be a huge task. Put simply, the difficulty lies in expressing meaning that is packaged in a few words bt visually and acoustically illustrated in a film that lasts for a couple of hours. Common practice shows two overriding strategies that dominate the area of film title translation: literal and liberal translation. However, there is a third strategy that attempts to convey meaning in a different way: creative translation. Quite often, this strategy is adopted by leading directors, and particularly when participating at an international film festival. This chapter examines the practice of translating film titles in Egypt by focusing on the strategy employed by one of Egypt’s great film directors, Youssef Chahine. The strategy is seemingly so simple, and yet it reveals the necessity of possessing an advanced degree of film literacy in order to be able to suggest alternative and quite often creative translations. Chahine, a perfectionist director, translates his film titles in a way that defies the prevailing two strategies. This is the area of creativity whereby a translation observes the rules of equivalence but, at the same time, packs meaning in an alternative way that appeals to the audience.
