| Sports, as one sign of social civilization, are an indispensable part of our social and cultural life. The development of global sports enjoys a universal attention, especially international sports games. Today, the sports section of some daily newspapers often makes up as much as one quarter of the whole. Sports news occupies a very important place in our daily life. Sports news headline, as the eye of the sports news, boasts its distinctive features, such as using a large number of terminologies, simple sentences and omissions, etc. Meanwhile, it requires certain cultural background knowledge to appreciate it. But a systemic and comprehensive analysis of the language of sports news headline has not been well attempted.In this view, this paper is intended to probe into the application of communicative and semantic translation put forward by Peter Newmark in sports news headline translation. In Newmark’s theory, communicative translation pays more attention to the conveying of the important information of the Source Language (SL) into the Target Language (TL). The purpose of doing so is to have a good communication with the readers of the TL. On the other hand, semantic translation emphasizes translating everything into TL without even changing the sequence and format of words and sentences in SL. The translator translates the text word by word without considering the acceptability and cultural background of the TL relationship. As far as the text type is concerned, sports news headlines belong to informative texts, yet containing intermingled characteristics of the author’s creating features and rich rhetorical devices and cultural elements. Hence, with regard to application of communicative translation and semantic translation, the author holds that translators should adopt flexible strategies according to different textual functions in headlines so as to guarantee the overall quality of translation. To be specific, the author suggests translators apply communicative translation to transmitting truthful information on the one hand and apply semantic translation to reserving literary and cultural features embedded in original headlines on the other hand.This thesis falls into five chapters. After introduction of the thesis, Chapter Two is the literature review, including definition of news headlines, news language and sports news headlines research. Chapter Three lays down the core theoretical foundation of this thesis by means of conducting in-depth researches into communicative translation and semantic translation, text typology and their relations. Chapter Four analyze the characteristics of the English sports news headlines in three fields:lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical features. The author also describes the differences between English and Chinese sports news headlines. Chapter Five is the theory implication to sports news headline translation, including analyzing the text type of sports news headline and the translation tactics. The last part of the thesis is a conclusion, which points out the implications and limitations of the thesis. |
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