MAIN STRATEGIES AND METHODS OF TRANSLATING ENGLISH LANGUAGE COMEDY FILM TITLES

The article focuses on the main strategies and methods of translating English-language comedy film titles into Ukrainian. The paper considers the concept of a film title as a kind of proper name that identifies a movie and is its own brand. The film title plays a key role in the perception of a film encouraging viewers to watch a particular film product. The methods of observation, analysis, induction, deduction and generalisation were used in the study. The necessary terms were defined through the descriptive method, and the comparative and contrastive method was used to compare the original film titles and their Ukrainian equivalents to identify linguistic differences and translation peculiarities. The main functions of film names are defined, namely nominative, advertising, informative, pragmatic, prognostic, and secondary functions, such as aesthetic, discriminative, phatic, metatextual, referential, expressive and nominal functions. The article analyzes three main translation strategies for English-language film titles into Ukrainian: direct translation, transformation, and indirect translation. The material for the study included the titles of English-language comedies released in 2023, totalling more than one hundred and twenty examples selected from the film database of the Ukrainian website kino-teatr. UA. The most common strategy was direct translation, which involved the use of such translation methods as transcoding, synonymous substitution, and calque. The strategy of transformation was carried out using the techniques of compression, decompression, meaning specification, transposition, partial contextual substitution, semantic development, expressivation, and descriptive translation. The least used strategy was indirect translation, which was related to the reproduction of genre specificity and cultural adaptation of film titles. The study demonstrates the importance of considering linguistic and cultural aspects when translating film titles, as the wrong strategies may result in the loss of culturally specific information or incomprehensibility for the target audience.