A comparative and diachronic analysis of film title translations and appellative effect transfer into Croatian and German

Studies of film title translations remain scant to this day. The existing studies mainly focus on investigating the sources of difficulties during the translation process. Although the studies employ different analytical approaches, the conclusion in almost all investigations is that the decisive objective during the translation process is the transfer or production of the appellative effect. This study investigates which strategies are employed during translation into Croatian and German and why, as well as possible diachronic changes in the choice of translation strategies. We created a corpus of 935 film titles from 1923 to 2017 and their translations into Croatian and German, which we first classified as direct translation, free translation, transcreation or transcription, and finally we quantitatively and qualitatively analysed the data. Our results show considerable differences between the two subcorpora in the choice of translation strategies and motivation, as well as in the patterns of diachronic change. Furthermore, correlations with specific cultural-historical processes are observed