The Chinese Translation Of English News Headlines From The Perspective Of Memetics

With the development of economic globalization and information technology, as the major transmission medium, news reports become more and more important in the fields of politics, economy and culture. As the most important part of a news story, which can make the newspaper readers get as much information as possible in a relatively shorter time, a fantastic and impressive news headline is half the battle, since a headline is compared to'the eye of the news report'. News translation, the necessity of world news communication, is like a bridge that connects people from different cultures. In the past, much attention has been paid to the traditional angles of functional teleology, relevance theory, rhetoric aesthetics and cross-culture communication, while this thesis attempts to probe into the Chinese translation practice of English news headlines from the perspective of memetics.The concept'meme'made its debut in Dawkin's influential book The Selfish Gene in 1976, since then, scholars at home and abroad began to apply the memetic theory into their own research fields, starting a craze for memetic studies. With great interest in the memetic theory and news headline translation, the author based on the meticulous reading of relevant works and papers employs memetics as the guiding theory and attempts to anatomize the transmission phenomena of memes in news headline language.Consisting of four parts, the overall movement of the thesis goes from theory study to practice. Chapter One is the literature review on news translation and memetic studies, which summarizes the research findings on news translation and its limitations and shortcomings, together with a brief review of the development of memetic theory at home and abroad. With a large amount of vivid sample headlines, Chapter Two focuses on the analysis of the unique language features of news headline language, from the aspects of lexicon, grammar, figures of speech and culture respectively. Chapter Three centers upon the memetic theory, and elaborates the genesis of the concept'meme', the features of successful memes, the interaction between language and meme, and the four stages of meme replication proposed by Heylighen, all of which pave the way for the unfolding of the next chapter. Chapter Four is the most important part of the thesis. Through the characteristics and classification of news headline language memes, it dwells on the translation strategies of English news headlines, i.e. repetition and analogy.To sum up, from the research results, memetic theory is proved to be of prominent significance in the practice of news headline translation. At last, the author hopes the discussion herewith the thesis can, to some extent, shed light on news headline translation enthusiasts in their fieldwork.