Features and Translation Strategies of English News Headlines
Yonghong Wu · 2017
News headline plays a significant part in various news, therefore news headline, especially its E-C translation, is drawing more attention.This thesis attempts to probe into the translation of English news headlines from the perspective of Communicative Translation and Semantic Translation in quest of efficient ways to accurately transmit information and retain as many cultural characteristics of the original headlines as possible.In this thesis, the author makes a thorough analysis of English news headlines on four levels, namely, the lexical, the grammatical, the rhetorical and the cultural.Based upon this analysis, the author points out that Communicative Translation is an appropriate option to handle the translation of English news headlines featuring lexical and grammatical characteristics since they are closely affiliated with information transmission.While dealing with the rhetorical and cultural features of English news headlines, translators can adopt Semantic Translation since they reflect the linguistic style and cultural elements of the original news headlines.In practical translation, the author holds that Communicative Translation and Semantic Translation cannot be employed separately.Only when the translator keeps both of them in a harmonious way can the translation be successful.Since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policies, Chinese people have gained more chances to communicate with other countries and regions in the world, so the translation of news headlines deserves special attention.Based upon the past achievements, the current author attempts to make a comprehensive investigation of English news headlines and then probe into their translation from the perspective of Newmark's Communicative Translation and Semantic Translation theory in quest of efficient ways to accurately transmit information and retain as many cultural characteristics of original headlines as possible.The author points out that Communicative Translation is an appropriate option to handle the translation of English news headlines featuring lexical and grammatical characteristics since they are closely affiliated with information transmission.While dealing with the rhetorical and cultural features of English news headlines, translators can adopt Semantic Translation since they reflect the linguistic style and cultural elements of the original news headlines.In practical translation process, the author holds that Communicative Translation and Semantic Translation cannot be employed separately, or neither of them can be exclusively treated as an alternative for the other.Only if the translator keeps both of them in a harmonious way would the translation be successful. Features of News HeadlinesGenerally, headlines are classified into single-deck headlines and multi-deck headlines, whose features are as the following: The Lexical Features of News Headlines.Midget words, especially nouns, are favored by news headlines, such as Energy savers, Hi-tech Project Highlights 5 Areas etc.Vogue words mushroom with the progression of society, for example, Internetese, bio-chip, American Online: Often Down, Never Out Abbreviations (or acronyms) and numerical words are used in a large scale.For example, expo, com'l, UNSC, WTC Flag Returned to NY Delegation (WTC=the World Trade Centre, NY=New York), QE2 may subs' target (QE2=Queen Elizabeth II; subs=submarines).The Grammatical Features of News Headlines.It is a common practice for English news headlines to omit certain elements to achieve syntactical terseness.Function words like articles, prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns are often omitted and occasionally substantives such as