Journalistic Language Translation A Pragmatic Approach

Being the media of information, journalism has convincingly demonstrated its significance for the contemporary world as we are making headway into the 21st century. Global news and information converge freely with the help of the latest information technologies that are not even imaginable decades ago. The power of journalism is never before stronger and its value never more widely recognized and utilized as it is today. As information is being shared by literally every member of the global village, journalistic language translation has become an urgent need for which a comprehensive, if not complete, system of translation theories and techniques must be adopted so that the huge amount of information waiting at the doorstep can be processed and capitalized on by speakers of different languages.This paper looks at the possibility of introducing pragmatic theories, in combination with the existing translation studies, into the realm of journalistic language translation. Journalistic writing, which is forever"tracking down"the latest events and progresses of the human society and which is in closest relevance with everyday life, best represents the way people use and understand language to make communication possible under differently circumstances. This feature of journalistic language happens to go side by side with the subject of study of pragmatics, considered as a science of language seen in relation to its users and the contexts. A brief account is made on the development history of pragmatics from its infancy into a multi-disciplinary academic field along with explanations on the major concepts of the study, on the basis of which pragmatic features of journalistic language in relation to those general concepts such as speech acts, inference, deixis, and implicature, etc. can be identified. Language use in journalistic writing is further exemplified from a pragmatic perspective by quotations taken directly from journalistic publications to see how linguistics units act or perform in a given context to fulfill the communicative intention of the writer or speaker and how and to what extent they are interrelated to convey meaning. Journalistic writers may draw from all sorts of resources in search of an expression most appropriate for a particular situation or a particular purpose. Therefore, language alone does not necessarily enact communication on all occasions. Meanings beyond the words can only be captured when linguistic units are taken into a relevance study and when the value or mission of each linguistic unit is identified.The concept of"Niche"is introduced in the latter part of the paper in an effort to substantiate the pragmatic approach to translation practices. Being termed as a set of linguistic and contextual elements that are most relevant to any linguistic unit in fulfillment of the intended communicative purposes, and with relevance at its core, niche provides a foundation upon which the value or mission of a linguistic unit is constructed. Niche can be understood as the ecosystem where the linguistic units used by the communicator reside in. Niche provides all the"air","water"and"food"required by the"residents"and regulates the way the residents act and perform in interaction with other elements. The niche identification model shows how niche can be up-scaled or down-scaled to accommodate linguistic units on different levels for translation studies and translation practices, supported by a case study in Chapter Four to further illustrate on how the pragmatic approach can actually be applied to journalistic language translation so that translation undertakings shall no longer be considered as the decoding of the source language text and encoding into a target language text, but rather, a process that involves all parties to the communication process, namely the language users, the writer, the translator and the reader. A pragmatic approach to journalistic language translation further requires culture awareness since journalism itself can very likely be a case of inter-cultural communication.