The following information is provided by Chinese Document Translation.
Sex and the City was one of the most popular TV series in the U.S. It was nominated and won the Emmys and Golden Globe several times. It has a special and interesting title that attracted viewers, making them want to spend 20 minutes watching the show. However, there was a need to make the title more formal and attractive.
Let’s analyze the episode titles of Sex and the City and suggest translation methods with the Chinese Document Translation company:
1. High level of generality: The episode titles are quite unique, unlike the sub-titles we seen on the news that contains more than 20 to 30 words. Due to time and cost constraints, the episode titles of Sex and the City could only be displayed on the screen for two seconds and the audience had to read them in two seconds and figure out the episode content . Based on all the episode titles of Sex and the City, the longest one only contained seven words: “What’s sex got to do with it?,” and two of these titles only had a single word: “one” and “splat”.
2. Prospective aspect: In Linguistics, “prospective” is a concept describing the use of language to be developed and applied in literature/textbooks. According to J.Mukarovsky, it calls attention, innovates, and goes beyond the norm. One way is to use structures that seem to defy ordinary rules. This kind of prospective was shown in the different language stages of Sex and The City and has caused different levels of translation difficulties.
(1) Audio level prospective: Multiple places used audio level prospective in the episode titles of Sex and the City. Screenwriters used music with alliteration, rhymes, quasi rhymes, consonant rhymes, anti-rhymes and repetitions to create a few catchy words for the audience, but this made translation work even harder.
① Alliteration（CVC）Same first consonant, such as “secret sex”, “critical condition”
② Quasi rhyme（CVC）Same vowel, such as “cock-a-doodle-doo”
③ Consonant rhyme（CVC）Same last consonant, such as “no ifs, ands, or buts”
④ Anti-rhyme（CVC）Same first consonant and vowel, such as “models and mortals”, “my keyboard, myself”
⑤ Rhyme（CVC）Same last consonant and vowel, such as “ring-a-ding-ding”
⑥ Repetition（CVC）e.g., “boy, girl, boy, girl……”, “to market, to market”
If you have other questions, feel free to contact the Chinese Document Translation company.