A Study Of English-Chinese News Headline Translation: An Adaptation-theoretic Perspective

With the strengthening of the intercultural communication between China and western countries, the field of news translation has attracted more and more attention. The research of news headline translation has started, but the focus is mainly on the concrete translating methods and techniques.This thesis attempts to explore news headline translation from a pragmatic perspective by adopting Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory. The theory argues that using language consists of the continuous making of linguistic choices in every possible level of language structure for linguistic and extra-linguistic reasons by the language users who use it consciously or unconsciously. According to Verschueren, context can be divided into linguistic context and communicative context, the latter mainly including physical world, social world and mental world. In the thesis, the author specifies the linguistic context into lexical, syntactical, semantic and rhetoric aspects. Under this theoretical framework, and by comparing and contrasting different levels of source news headlines and the corresponding target news headline, the author would like to reveal that different contextual correlates play a very important role in the translation process of news headline translation, and news headline translators have to adapt to linguistic convention as well as the factors in physical world and social world so as to approach their communicative need, which is to attract the Chinese audience to read the translated news headline by its embodied transferred news value. In conclusion, the author creates a tentative model of News Headline Translation under the framework of Adaptation Theory, which is based on the exemplification and analysis in Chapter Five of the thesis proper.