On Translation Of News Headlines From The Angle Of Skopostheorie And Transitivity

In the highly informational society, news has become an indispensable channel for people to know about the world. As the essence of a news report, news headline plays an important role. Shanghai World Expo of2010is an attractive gathering for people around the world, and the news reports on the official website of Shanghai Expo have been translated into different languages. This website has functioned as a window for people to know about Shanghai World Expo. The author focuses on the translation of the news headlines on this website, with a view to giving some reference to the studies of news headlines translation.Recently, translation studies of news headlines have become the topic of many scholars at home and abroad. With various translational theories and viewpoints, including language and culture, functional equivalence, and functional linguistics, the scholars have made great achievements. However, it is not common to do translational study by integrating Skopostheorie and transitivity. The author believes that there is a need to integrate Skopostheorie and transitivity, because transitivity can serve as a research tool for the text analysis and Skopostheorie is the theory to explain the translation phenomena.Skopostheorie is a vital part of German functionalist school, which points out that translation is a kind of action with purpose—the needs of target readers. The target text and target readers become the focus of translation. Transitivity is one type of experiential function in systemic functional grammar proposed by Halliday, which represents the relationship between human beings and the world. Human experience related to the outside world is construed with six processes, which involve different participants and circumstantial elements related to these processes. These six processes are:material process, mental process, relational process, behavioral process, verbal process and existential process.This thesis first studies the transitivity shifts between the source and target texts Then, it categorizes the different shifts of transitivity in the source and target texts, and tries to find out the principles and reasons for these shifts. The shifts in transitivity bring about changes in the focus of the texts, and some also lead to the imbalance of information. These translational phenomena are explained by Skopostheorie, which is, these shifts in transitivity are made for achieving the Skopos of the texts—to make the target text native and acceptable, in order to attract as many visitors as possible.