Language Features And Translation Strategies Of English News Headlines

Newspapers are regularly published periodicals produced for a particular town, city or region, reporting current affairs to the public. A newspaper story is usually composed of three parts: the headline, the lead and the body. A headline is an indispensable component of a news report. The headline is the title of the story—the words that will be read and draw great attention. It is a digest or a condensation of the whole story. Readers, using headlines as a guide, scan the newspaper, searching for clues to stories that interest them.Every newspaper has its own personality to express its own attitude, serious or sensational. To present the news effectively, it must choose the headlines which meet a possibly large number of requirements. Although the headline-writing practices vary from one newspaper to another within a small range of differences, the requirements and purposes are universal for all of them.The newspaper headline is usually designed to precisely convey the essence of a complicated set of facts. It intends to catch the readers on the wing. It is a model of the language accurately presented, swiftly readable, intensively compact and attractively designed. It aims to tell the news to the readers, seizing their attention and attract potential audience. By doing so, the newspaper shows its unique characteristics and stability.The use of language in newspaper headlines shows, therefore, that an artistic presentation lies in the effective and rational use of words and sentence. Based on the sample headlines collected from textbooks about news-editing and a wide range of newspapers, this thesis intends to make an analysis of the language used in newspaper headlines by means of linguistic devices. The thesis will examine such linguistic elements as graphetics, graphology, vocabulary, and grammar used in newspaper headlines.The translation of headlines is a vital stage in the process of news translation. So far, some Chinese translators have embarked on relevant researches in this area, offering valuable insights on procedures and techniques to the translation. 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 much as possible the creating and cultural characteristics of original headlines.This thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter One is the introduction. It gives a general description of the news headlines from the discussion of such aspects as the definition, the requirements, the types, and the functions.Chapter Two, with three sections, gives an in-depth analysis of the language features of newspaper headlines from the perspective of stylistics. The graphetic and graphological features in newspaper headlines are expounded from such aspects as typography, capitalization and punctuation which are commonly seen in the publications. The lexical features in newspaper headlines are analyzed from the critical use of active verbs and word formation. Many typical grammatical phenomena such as present and future tenses, the active voice, subject omitted structure are analyzed in this part.Chapter Tluee lays down the core theoretical foundation of this thesis by means of conducting an in-depth research into communicative translation (CT) and semantic translation (ST), text typology and their relations. Above all, Peter Newmark's definitions of communicative translation and semantic translation are introduced. Then the author makes a comprehensive comparison between CT and ST including both similarities and differences. Finally, the relationship between CT&ST and text typology is discussed with some typical examples.Chapter Four dwells on the application of CT and ST, analyzing the text type, seeking the translation criteria and dealing with specific problems in the translation. In the light of Peter Newmark's text typology and methods of communicative translation and semantic translation, the author explores the translation strategies of news headlines, which encompass identifying the text type, seeking the translation principles and exercising the two methods. The difficulties confronting the author mainly lie in the hybrid textual features of news headlines, which means that no headline is purely characterized by a unique function. It follows that neither communicative translation nor semantic translation can be separately applied to one single headline. In this chapter, the author offers some translation criteria and then further demonstrates how to handle specific problems in the translation of English news headlines.