한·일 영화 포스터의 제목 및 비주얼 고찰 -멜로·드라마 장르를 중심으로-

Abstract

The study aims to compare and analyze the different translational aspects in film titles and poster visuals observed in Japanese and Korean melodramatic movie posters. There is a difference in the way that Japanese and Koreans translate film titles. The Japanese are inclined to resort to liberal translation over literal translation or transliteration, while Koreans have a relatively higher tendency to choose literal translation or transliteration over liberal translation. The visuals pertaining to the study have been analyzed in four aspects: eye-level, mode of address, modality and lay-out. As a result, it could be observed that movie posters created in Japan tended to depict visuals that imply some idea of the mood and the ending of the film by, for example, depicting a man and a woman looking away in opposite directions, or by depicting one person glancing at the other. The general angle in such posters would be set to eye-level angle in order to generate a sense of kinship. For melodramatic films with titles and visuals that don't allow any inference as to its genre or content, the Japanese would change the title into one that fits a melodramatic film and would also change the visuals of its poster by, for example, replacing broad smiles with tender smiles or sorrowful expressions regarding the main characters appearing in the poster in order to emphasize that it is a melodramatic film. And in the case of lay-out, Japanese movie posters often tended to have a sort of composition division to put emphasis on the cast appearing in the poster. It was also commonly observed that the face of popular actors or actresses were zoomed in for a close-up in both Korean and Japanese movie posters with the aim of causing publicity effect. Such actors and actresses were given greater emphasis than the film content or the film title itself.