On E-C Translation Of Financial News Headlines:From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As the carrier of financial information,financial news is an important channel for people to understand the world economy.People often browse the English financial news to get the latest information about the world’s financial market as well as risks and costs related to financial market transactions with a view to making investment and managing wealth wisely.Faced with massive financial news reports,people tend to select the news that are of interest to them by glancing over the headlines.The effective translation of news headline can quickly catch the attention of the target readers.To keep the translated title charming and to ensure that the target readers obtain English financial news information accurately and smoothly,the quality of headline translation is very critical.Therefore,more and more attention has been directed to the English-Chinese(E-C)translation of financial news headlines(FNHs),which is worth exploring.Jef Verschueren’s Adaptation theory holds that language use is a process of continuous selection and adaptation for the purpose of communication,which provides a new perspective for the study of the translation of FNHs.Therefore,this thesis constructs a theoretical framework based on the Adaptation theory to investigate the E-C translation of FNHs.The author collected 100 Financial news headlines(50 in English,50 in Chinese)from the financial columns of a dozen authoritative websites released from February 2018 to January 2020.The contrastive analysis approach is employed to explore and summarize the linguistic similarities and differences between English financial news headlines(EFNHs)and Chinese financial news headlines(CFNHs).Meanwhile,the qualitative analysis method is adopted to elaborate the concrete application of Adaptation theory in the process of E-C translation of FNHs with plenty of examples from the data collected.It is found in this study that there exist a number of linguistic similarities and differences between EFNHs and CFNHs.The similarities lie in that they both pursueaccuracy and succinctness;several grammatical elements or meaningless words are often omitted;numeral words,present tense and rhetorical devices are widely used.In terms of distinctive differences,midget words and abbreviations often appear in EFNHs whereas four-character words are preferred by CFNHs;EFNHs usually begin with nouns while CFNHs begin with verbs,etc.Besides,since the translation process of financial news is a special cross-cultural communication activity,translators are supposed to consider the target audiences’ cognition,culture and other differences to make a variety of appropriate linguistic choices and adaptations.Therefore,in the process of E-C translation of FNHs,to realize internal adaptation,the corresponding linguistic adaptation strategies(such as lexical conversion,sentential conversion,artful use of punctuation marks,rewriting)are adopted to make language choices at the lexical,grammatical and rhetorical level.To realize external adaptation,communicative adaptation strategies(such as literal translation,addition,conversion,rewriting,replacement,imitation,quotation,paraphrase)are employed to adapt to Chinese readers’ physical world(time,space),social world(social settings,culture)and mental world(cognition,emotions).The proper appliance of these adaptation strategies is beneficial to the better realization of the informative,pragmatic and aesthetic function of the FNHs,making target titles more in line with Chinese audiences’ reading demands,thereby engaging them to browse the news body and obtain valuable financial information.Under the guidance of Adaptation theory,this thesis explores the E-C translation of FNHs in a systematic and comprehensive way,which enriches the application of Adaptation theory and also provides some enlightenment for the translation of FNHs.