Why 'Moana' Became 'Oceania' – The Translation of Disney Film Titles in Italy

In order to discern what patterns emerge in the translation into Italian of film titles produced by the Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios, this paper analyzes a corpus of 80 movies whose titles are originally in English. The corpus includes motion pictures released between 1937 and March 2020, and further data was gathered thanks to online film databases such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and Movieplayer.it. The findings of this study have been divided into two sections: titles in English and titles in Italian, with the latter being the dominant category. The research yielded that the most important factors that distributors take into account to ensure the success of a film title are the target culture and the target audience, and the strategies that have been identified reflect this focus. Despite the rather scarce pieces of research available, title translation remains an interesting field of study that needs to be further developed.