Animated Film Titles : Perspectives on collaborative creation and translation

Film titles play a crucial role in their marketing and distribution abroad. This research is informed by titology as applied to animated film titles along with insights from translaboration, or the combination of translation and collaboration. The study analyses a corpus of animated film titles originally created in English and then translated for distribution in Italy and in Russia. The aim is to explore convergent and divergent trends concerning titling choices, title functions and collaborative translation strategies, applying a combined quanti–qualitative perspective. The findings identify a number of recurrent semantic fields that suggest the existence of a genre–indicating function spe-cific to animated film titles, working in creative synergy with the commercial function to elicit interest in potential viewership. These thematic elements are intentionally enhanced in translation both into Russian and into Italian. The findings overview how the collaborative dimension influenced the choice of direct translation strategies, ranging from literal to zero–translation, to include the contributions of multiple decision–makers.