| In the age of information, with the rapid development of transmission instrument, the Internet, which isregarded as the fourth medium, plays a vital role in people s daily life and brings changes in every aspect ofhuman society. Reading news on the Internet has become one of the habits of people s daily life. People can getfirst-hand information all over the world within doors in a very short time. A news headline is the summary ofnews contents, and readers have formed a habit of skimming the headlines before they read the news reports.The quality of web news headline is a determinant factor of news transmission. Because of the characteristics ofisolation between headlines and news contents, only the attractive headlines can spark people s desire for furtherreading. To some extent, web news headlines determine the click rate of the news reports.Memetics, based on the theory of biological evolution, is a new theory to interpret cultural evolution.Memetics is so powerful that it attracts scholars to conduct researches in different fields. Meme is units ofcultural transmission which “propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via aprocess which is called imitation”. Meme is equipped with three features, namely, copy-fidelity, fecundity andlongevity. Contagious nature of memes is in conformity with propagation of information in web news headline.Memetics provides a brand new perspective for web news headline translation.The overall movement of the thesis goes from theory to practice. It combines memes lifecycle theory withtranslation memetics as the theoretical framework. Firstly, a comprehensive analysis of web news headlinesfeatures from five aspects is made. Secondly, any organization or system can be viewed as a meme pool. Thetranslation meme pool in the present thesis is divided into source language meme pool and target languagememe pool. Translation is regarded as an encoding and decoding process. The translator s cognitive activitiesare analyzed, and then the author tries to establish a tentative translation process of web news headlines.Furthermore, the author classifies the relationship between source language meme and target language memeinto four sorts based on semantic relevance principle, namely, identical meaning and form, different forms withidentical meaning, different forms with associative meaning, and non-equivalence. In light of this method, sometypical web news headlines are discussed and useful inspirations are provided for each sort of web newsheadlines translation. Last but not least, the author puts forward two problems which should be noted in thisstudy.1. Translator is a determinant factor in making successful web news headlines, thus translator squalifications are of great importance.2. Because of the culture gap, not all the source memes can find theirequivalent or associative memes in the target meme pool, so the translator should give due attention to this problem.To sum up, from the research result, the combination of meme lifecycle theory and translation memetics isproved to be of significance in the practice of web news headlines. At last, the author hopes this study can, tosome extent, shed lights on web new headlines enthusiasts in their fieldwork. |
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