Translations of the Titles of Works of Chinese Literature into Polish

Abstract

The title of literary work fulfills many functions and plays an important role — serves as a showcase of the work and appears as its most frequently quoted and repeated passage. In this paper, in selected examples of titles’ translations of literary works from Chinese into Polish, four methods have been distinguished: literal translations, semantic translations, cultural adaptations and copying of titles from indirect translations, or from film adaptations. The quoted titles clearly show that the linguistic approach is superseded by the analysis of the socio-cultural context of the country of the target culture. Therefore, although the translator sometimes makes surprising decisions, he goes away drastically from the title of the original work, emphasizes elements that the author left behind in the shadow, or omits those that the author tried to display, he does it consciously, because his goal is to obtain the highest degree of equivalence.