On E-C Translation Of News Headlines

The globalization of media is nowadays a key area of interest and the role of translation within global news flow has received more and more attention. News headline translation falls into the field of press translation and it represents a common practice carried out by media in different countries. Press translation reaches a very large number of readers, certainly larger than that of translation for literature or theatre, and translated news headlines contribute to the shaping of reader's opinions, actively influencing the way they perceive the world around them. This is particularly true of translated news headlines as forerunners to news reports. News headlines reach the audience considerably wider than the translated news story itself, which are strategically used by the editor by choosing emotive vocabulary, eye-catching layout and rhetorical devices to make an impact on the readership. Hence the importance of news headline translation can hardly be exaggerated.However, the current study in this field is comparatively under-explored with a serious lack of guiding theory. And still we can see a lack of development in the area of psychological cognition in the process of news headline translation. Understanding the importance of human cognition in translation practice and the need to build up a cognitive theoretical framework for news headline translation, the author aims to make such an endeavor in this thesis. Cognitive relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson has developed from an inferential model of communication and an effective description of human communication process. Gutt pioneered the application of relevance theory to the translation study and established it within a theoretical framework for translation. Within the framework of relevance theory, translation is accounted for as an interlingual interpretive use of language. Gutt's account primarily addresses the relevance theoretic translation principles and processes, as translation gains the communicative nature in terms of relevance theory. And the translator is required to reconstruct the original communicative intention, project the original and target receptor's cognitive environment, and craft a stimulus according to the degree of interpretive resemblance sought. News headline translation is generally a kind of text translation with the displacement in time and place between the original communicator and the receptor, thus the task of translators is to establish communication between different countries around the world, and in most cases the target receptor shares least of the manifest cognitive environment with the original author. So the translator's choice of stimulus relies heavily on this access to cognitive context and the target audience's inferential abilities. News headline translators need guidelines to project context available and choose appropriate stimuli.In Chapter One, the author introduces the current research in this thesis from perspectives of its theoretical significance, purpose of the study, methodology and data collection, with the whole structure outlined in the end part of this chapter.In Chapter Two, the author mainly summarizes the research on news headline translation from perspective of relevance theory both abroad and at home, through which the author concludes that the study in this field is undertheorized and underexplored. The author points out such problems in the research of news headline translation in current situation and tries to make an endeavour to make a theoretical study within a cognitive framework. Also the author makes a brief survey of news headline and its translation for the ease of future study.In Chapter Three, the author attempts to make a general introduction of relevance theory and Gutt's relevance translation framework. With a few general remarks about relevance theory and relevance translation theory, it can be concluded that relevance theory is very persuasive and sophisticated, and it can also be applied to explain the translation activity. As for relevance translation study, Gutt is the one who first introduces relevance theory into translation. And being the most important one in this filed, Gutt believes that translation is a kind of interlingual communication and treats translation under the framework of relevance theory. Gutt's research offers an explicit account of translation as an instance of the interpretive use of language across language boundaries. That is to say, translation as an ostensive-inferential communication and interpretive use of language would be consistent with optimal relevance and should interpretively resemble the original.In Chapter Four, the author handles a practical research to explain the feasibility of relevance theory in explaining news headline translation. At first, the author begins with a series of assumptions about the ongoing research, and crystallizes some important procedures of the conduction of the research. Since Gutt's framework mainly consists of optimal relevance and interpretive resemblance in translating, the author carries out the news headline translation along these dimensions. To offer a better instance to illustrate news headline translation in practice, the author also applies Gutt's approaches namely direct and indirect translation to make a tentative analysis of the data with a lot of headline examples from the bilingual media. Then through the analysis of news headline translation from the perspective of relevance theory in its practical sense, the author sums up the features of relevance theoretic account of news headline translation, including the distinctive role of the translator, the translation process in cognitive translation and faithfulness in news headline translation.To sum up, this thesis takes the relevance translation theory and Gutt's framework as the macro-guidance and attempts to probe into the news headline translation in quest of efficient ways to accurately transmit information and retain as much as possible the creativity and intention of original headlines. The author explores the translation principles of news headline from the perspective of relevance theory, proves the applicability of relevance theory to news headline translation and makes a tentative endeavor to cast light on practical news headline translation.