A Study on the Construction Mechanism and Sociocultural Motivations of Gendered Semantics in Film and Television Title Translation

As a key medium of cross-cultural communication, translated film and television titles carry distinct cultural values and gender narratives in their semantic construction. Adopting Leech’s seven categories of meaning as the theoretical framework, this paper analyzes more than twenty representative translated film and television titles from home and abroad via qualitative textual analysis and comparative research. It explores gender-based semantic shifts across seven categories during Chinese translation, namely conceptual meaning, connotative meaning, social meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, collocative meaning and thematic meaning. The results reveal that Chinese translations of film and television titles selectively amplify, downplay or restructure meanings at different levels, thereby shaping narrative frameworks that stereotype female characters by overemphasizing their appearance, framing them as subordinate roles and limiting their diversified portrayals. Such gendered semantic construction arises from the interplay of traditional gender norms, audience expectations, market consumption logic and translation conventions. While it serves as an adaptive strategy in cross-cultural communication, it also reinforces gender stereotypes to a certain extent. On the basis of objective phenomenon analysis, this paper proposes translation strategies that pursue dynamic balance among all semantic dimensions and uphold gender sensitivity, aiming to offer theoretical and practical references for more accurate and inclusive cross-cultural translation of film and television works.