This study examines bidirectional film title translation through the perspectives of prospective compression and retrospective expansion, drawing on Wang Jianguo’s (2025) contrastive account of Chinese and English, particularly the differences between process orientation and result orientation and between weak and strong semantic boundaries. Based on a qualitative comparative analysis of 16 Chinese and English film titles, the study identifies four major application paths for each direction of translation. In Chinese-to-English translation, prospective compression is manifested through process-to-result, concrete-to-abstract, event-toobject, and positive-comparison-to-comparative transformations. These operations condense processual meaning, strengthen semantic boundaries, and produce concise and target-oriented English titles. In English-to-Chinese translation, retrospective expansion operates through resultto-process, abstract-to-concrete, object-to-event, and comparative-to-positive transformations. These operations recover implicit processes, concrete imagery, and narrative information, thereby increasing the accessibility and expressive appeal of Chinese titles. The analysis shows that the two strategies are particularly compatible with the functional demands of film titles, including brevity, thematic communication, genre identification, and cross-cultural accessibility. At the same time, the study argues that neither strategy should be applied mechanically: compression should not result in excessive semantic loss, while expansion should not introduce meanings unsupported by the source title. The findings provide a practical framework for bidirectional film title translation and offer a case-based application of contrastive ChineseEnglish analysis to audiovisual translation.