A Memetic Analysis Of News Headlines And Its Inspiration To Their Translation

For news, its transmission effectiveness which is mostly determined by its headline, is very important. A good headline should be eye-catching and can arouse the readers'desire for reading so that the news can spread quickly and widely. So the translation of news headlines is a very demanding job. This thesis, which argues from a new study perspective tries to apply memetics to the study of news headline translation.Firstly, this thesis gives a general introduction of memetics. Memetics, which originates from the theory of biological evolution, is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution. The core conception of memetics is"meme"which can propagate itself from brain to brain like a gene or a virus. The propagation nature of meme is coincident with the transmission nature of news. So it is necessary and feasible to apply memetics to the study of news headline translation.Secondly, this thesis gives a detailed memetic analysis of news headlines. News headline language memes are divided into genotypical language memes and phenotypic language memes. The former transmit themselves by two means: transmitting the same meaning by direct repetition and transmitting the same meaning with different language forms. The latter propagate themselves by three means: transmitting different meaning by a homonym; transmitting different meaning by the same language structure; transmitting imaginary meaning by the same language form.Finally, two translation strategies of news headlines are presented-- repetition strategy and analogy strategy. Repetition strategy falls into foreignization, while analogy strategy, which consists of four translation methods-- direct quotation method, homophony method, identical language set pattern method and associative meaning method, is a kind of domestication.In a word, memetics offers us a new theoretical perspective of news headline translation study. The translation strategies drawn from this new perspective helps to make the translated news headline become a strong meme which can propagate itself at a surprising speed. The application of memetics to the study of news headline translation will become a new and promising field.