Working Titles. Computational Analysis of Film Titling Practices: A Polish Case Study

Abstract

This article traces historical trends in film titling practices in Poland, based on quantitative analysis of film metadata. The authors analyse a corpus of 2,519 films produced in Poland until 2023, looking at regularities in the naming of Polish original films: the average length of titles, title duplication, the most frequent content words typical of successive phases in the history of Polish cinematography, lexical diversity, and the presence of proper names and foreignisms. Then they replicate some of the tests on the corpus of foreign films translated into Polish, which includes 5,585 foreign films distributed in Poland between 1945 and 1989 and 33,794 films released in Poland after 1989. The authors compare the peculiarities of the original titles and those translated into Polish in search of similarities and discrepancies, potentially symptomatic of translationese, or titlese.

Keywords

• film title
• metadata analysis
• title translation
• film history
• history of Polish cinema