The translation of film titles has received much attention in translation studies as the titles play a crucial role in conveying the content of the films and serve as an important marketing tool to attract audiences. Research on the translation of film titles, however, has mainly dealt with the types of strategies adopted by the translators or distributors while viewers’ responses have received little attention. This study takes a two-pronged approach to bridge this gap and investigates how viewers actually respond to different translation strategies. Analysing 724 imported film titles released from 2000 to 2016 in Korea together with a questionnaire survey, we investigated the viewers’ cognitive and behavioural responses to different types of translation strategies. The results show that while transliteration is the most widely adopted translation strategy in Korea, the survey respondents show inconsistency between their cognitive and behavioural responses to film title translations. This incongruence suggests a discrepancy between implied and actual readers, which has meaningful implications for both film marketing and translation education.