Difficulties in Translation of Publicistic Headlines and their Pragmatic Aspect

Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others.

Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). It has, consequently, more to do with the analysis of what people mean by their utterances than what the words or phrases in those utterances might mean by themselves. Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning. This type of study necessary involves the interpretation of what people mean in a particular context and how the context influences what is said. It requires a consideration of how speakers organize what to say in accordance with who they’re talking to, where, when, and under what circumstances. Pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning. This approach also necessary explores how listeners can make inferences about what is said in order to arrive at an interpretation of the speaker’s intended meaning. This type of study explores how a great deal of what is unsaid is recognized as part of what is communicated. We might say that it is the investigation of invisible meaning. Pragmatics is the study of how more gets communicated than is said. This perspective then raises the question of what determines the choice between the said and the unsaid. The basic answer is tied to the notion of distance. Closeness, whether it is physical, social, or conceptual, implies shared experience. On the assumption of how close or distant the listener is speakers determine how much needs to be said. Pragmatics is the study of the expression of relative distance. These are the four areas that pragmatics is concerned with. To understand how it got to be that way, we have to briefly review its relationship with other areas of linguistic analysis. [17, p.3] “Pragmatics is all about the meanings between the lexis and the grammar and the phonology...Meanings are implied and the rules being followed are unspoken, unwritten ones.”[16, George Keith]

“Pragmatics is a way of investigating how sense can be made of certain texts even when, from a semantic viewpoint, the text seems to be either incomplete or to have a different meaning to what is really intended. Consider a sign seen in a children's wear shop window: “Baby Sale - lots of bargains”. We know without asking that there are no babies are for sale - that what is for sale are items used for babies. Pragmatics allows us to investigate how this “meaning beyond the words” can be understood without ambiguity. The extra meaning is there, not because of the semantic aspects of the words themselves, but because we share certain contextual knowledge with the writer or speaker of the text.

Pragmatics is an important area of study for your course. A simplified way of thinking about pragmatics is to recognize, for example, that language needs to be kept interesting - a speaker or writer does not want to bore a listener or reader, for example, by being over-long or tedious. So, humans strive to find linguistic means to make a text, perhaps, shorter, more interesting, more relevant, more purposeful or more personal. Pragmatics allows this.

George Keith notes that: “The vast majority of pragmatics studies have been devoted to conversation, where the silent influence of context and the undercurrents are most fascinating.

But he goes on to show how written texts of various kinds can be illuminated by pragmatics, and he cites particular examples from literature. Pragmatics gives us ways into any written text. Take the following example, which is a headline from the Guardian newspaper of May 10, 2002. This read: “Health crisis looms as life expectancy soars.”

If we study the semantics of the headline, we may be puzzled. The metaphor (“soars”) indicates an increase in the average life-expectancy of the UK population. Most of us are living longer. So why is this crisis for health? Pragmatics supplies the answer. The headline writer assumes that we share his or her understanding that the crisis is not in the health or longevity of the nation, but in the financial cost to our society of providing health care for these long-living people. The UK needs to pay more and employ more people to provide this care. Reading the article will show this. Or take any item of unsolicited mail more or less at random - such as a letter sent to me by Mr. David Moyes, the manager of Everton Football Club. Mr. Moyes opens with an invitation: “SUPPORT YOUR TEAM”, followed by the question:

“How would you like to support Everton and receive some excellent benefits at the same time?”

After this come details of a Platinum Plus credit card and some associated offers of free gifts. The letter closes with a copy of Mr. Moyes' signature, with his name and position (“Team Manager”) in print below. We can conjecture that the immediate writer of this letter is not Mr. Moyes, but someone with knowledge of financial products, employed by the club to help raise money from fans. I can be more confident that this is so, since it is only a few months since I received a near-identical letter, bearing the signature of the previous manager, Mr. Walter Smith. The writer assumes that he or she is addressing people who have at some point described themselves as supporters of Everton FC - the mail shot will have gone only to names on a database of such potential cardholders. Closer inspection suggests that the letter does not necessarily come from the club, as “Everton” appears in a typeface different from the surrounding text - prompting the thought that the card issuer (MBNA Europe bank Limited) is the real source of the letter, and has signed up various sporting clubs to endorse its product. The card issuer understands that recipients of such offers will rarely wish to apply for a new credit card, and therefore attempts to exploit my affection for Everton FC as a novel or sentimental reason to do so. The second half of the opening sentence may reflect a sense that most supporters do not receive “excellent benefits at the same time” - though perhaps the humour here is unintended. This kind of practical analysis is a good exercise. Sometimes a teacher will need to ask students to write it, but this will limit how much you can do. It would be better for members of a teaching group to spend five or ten minutes at least once a week, producing an unprepared spoken pragmatic reading of texts chosen at random by the teacher or student. Pragmatics as an explicit field of study is not compulsory for students taking Advanced level courses in English Language. But it is one of the five “descriptions of language” commended by the AQA syllabus B (the others are: lexis, grammar, phonology and semantics). In some kinds of study it will be odd if some consideration of pragmatics does not appear in your analysis or interpretation of data. In commenting on texts you are seeing for the first time, you may need to make use of some pragmatic concepts, as in this example, from Adrian Attwood:

We know from the question that Text F is a sales script. The pragmatic consideration of this text makes us look for features, which are designed to reassure the potential customer rather than to inform them. Particularly, in this case, where the script is for a telephone conversation and one of the objects from the sales-person's viewpoint is to keep the other person talking. This means that the text will try to close off as many potential exits as possible and therefore be similar to some of the normal co-operative principles of spoken language.

In language investigations or research into language, you can choose whether to undertake a task in which pragmatic analysis is appropriate. So if you really don't like it (or fear it), then you should avoid a task where its absence will look suspicious, and draw attention to your dislike. One area of language study where pragmatics is more or less unavoidable is any kind of study of spoken language in social interactions (and written forms like e-mail or computer chat that approximate to speech). In studying language and occupation or language and power, you cannot easily avoid the use of pragmatic frameworks for analysis. This guide has few examples in it, because I have supposed that you will apply the analytical methods, under your teachers' guidance, to texts that you find for yourself - including spoken data in audio and video recordings.

heading newspaper translation

Chapter II On the translability of publicistic headlines

2.1 On the approaches of translation used in Newspaper Style

English newspaper style may be defined as a system of interrelated lexical, phraseological and grammatical means which is perceived by the community speaking the language as a separate unity that basically serves the purpose of informing and instructing the reader.

Since the primary function of newspaper style is to impart information, only printed matter serving this purpose comes under newspaper style proper. Such matter can be classed as:

1. brief news items and communiqués;

2. press reports (parliamentary, of court proceedings, etc.);

3. articles purely informational in character;

4. advertisements and announcements.

The most concise form of newspaper informational is the headline. The headlines of news items, apart from giving information about the subject-matter, also carry a considerable amount of appraisal (the size and arrangement of the headline, the use of emotionally colored words and elements of emotive syntax), thus indicating the interpretation of the facts in the news item that follows.

a) Brief news items

The function of a brief news item is to inform the reader. It states only facts without giving comments. Newspaper style has its specific vocabulary features and is characterized by an extensive use of:

1. special political and economic terms;

2. non-term political vocabulary;

3. newspaper cliché;

4. abbreviations;

5. neologisms.

The following grammatical peculiarities of brief news items are of paramount importance, and may be regarded as grammatical parameters of newspaper style:

1. complex sentences with a developed system of clauses;

2. verbal constructions;

3. syntactical complexes;

4. attributive noun groups;

5. specific word order.

b) The headline

The headline is the title given to a news item of a newspaper article. The main function of the headline is to inform the reader briefly of what the news that follows is about.

Syntactically headlines are very short sentences or phrases of a variety of patterns:

1. full declarative sentences;

2. interrogative sentences;

3. nominative sentences;

4. elliptical sentences;

5. sentences with articles omitted;

6. phrases with verbals;

7. questions in the forms of statements;

8. complex sentences;

9. headlines including direct speech.

c) Advertisements and announcements

The function of advertisement and announcement is to inform the reader. There are 2 basic types of advertisements and announcements in the modern English newspaper: classified and non-classified(separate).

In classified advertisements and announcements various kinds of information are arranged according to subject-matter into sections, each bearing an appropriate name.

As for the separate advertisements and announcements, the variety of language form and subject-matter is so great that hardly any essential features common to all be pointed out.

d) The editorial

Editorials are an intermediate phenomenon bearing the stamp of both the newspaper style and the publistic style.

The function of the editorial is to influence the reader by giving an interpretation of certain facts. Emotional coloring in editorial articles is also achieved with the help of various stylistic devices(especially metaphors and epithets), both lexical and syntactical, the use of which is largely traditional.

e) Scientific prose style

The language of science is governed by the aim of the functional style of scientific prose, which is to prove a hypothesis, to create new concepts, to disclose the internal laws of existence, development, relations between different phenomena, etc. There are following characteristic features of scientific style:

1. the logical sequence of utterances;

2. the use of terms specific to each given branch of science;

3. so-called sentence-patterns. They are of 3 types: postulatory, argumentative and formulative.

4. the use of quotations and references;

5. the frequent use of foot-note, of the reference kind, but digressive in character.

The impersonality of scientific writings can also be considered a typical feature of this style.

f) The style of official documents

In standard literary English this is the style of official documents. It is not homogeneous and is represented by the following substyles or variants:

1. the language of business documents;

2. the language of legal documents;

3. that of diplomacy;

4. that of military documents.

The main aim of this type of communication is to state the conditions binding two parties in an undertaking. The most general function of the style of official documents predetermines the peculiarities of the style. The most noticeable of all syntactical features are the compositional patterns of the variants of this style.

The over-all code of the official style falls into a system of subcodes, each characterized by its own terminological nomenclature, its own compositional form, its own variety of syntactical arrangements. But the integrating features of all these subcodes emanating from the general aim of agreement between parties, remain the following:

1. conventionality of expression;

2. absence of any emotiveness;

3. the encoded character of language; symbols and

4. a general syntactical mode of combining several pronouncements into one sentence.[1, Stylistics]

On the approaches of translation used in Newspaper Style are pragmatic value of publicistic headlines and difficulties of their translation it is grammatical features in English and Russian Headlines.

2.2 On the ways of translation the publicistic headlines

The second half of the 20th century has seen the in-depth study of translation, which is sometimes called Theory of Translation, Science of Translation, Translation Linguistics, or even Translatology.

It has been claimed abroad that translation studies began in 1972 with Holmes’s paper presented at the Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics, “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies”.1 However, unfortunately, European and American scholars seemed to have been unaware of the achievements of the Russian school of translation studies. Works by V. Komissarov, A. Shveitser, A. Fedorov and many others confirmed the status of translation studies as a discipline of its own even in the 1950s.

The main concern of translation theory is to determine appropriate translation methods for the widest possible range of texts and to give insight into the translation process, into the relations between thought and language, culture and speech.

There are several aspects of this branch of linguistics:

·                   General theory of translation, whose object is general notions typical of translation from any language.

·                   Specific (or partial, in terms of Holmes) theory of translation that deals with the regularities of translation characteristic of particular languages - for example, translation from English into Russian and vice versa.

·                   Special (partial) theory of translation that pays attention to texts of various registers and genres.

There are two terms corresponding to the Russian word “перевод”: translation and interpretation. Those who discriminate between the terms refer the term ‘translation’ to the written text, and the term ‘interpretation’ to oral speech. However, the terms are polysemantic: to interpret might mean “to render or discuss the meaning of the text” – an outstanding British translation theorist P.Newmark, for example, states that “when a part of a text is important to the writer’s intention, but insufficiently determined semantically, the translator has to interpret”.4 The term to translate is often referred to any (written or oral) manner of expression in another language.

We should also differentiate the terms translating and rendering. When we translate, we express in another language not only what is conveyed in the source text but also how it is done. In rendering, we only convey the ideas (the what) of the source text.

Several approaches are used for defining translation: in Newspaper Style with pragmatic value of publicistic headlines and difficulties of their translation it is grammatical features in English and Russian Headlines.

2.3 On the difficulties in translation the publicistic headlines

Often enough headings of newspapers or news on the Internet in English are difficult enough for understanding. First, they have the grammatical nuances. Secondly, in headlines use the words which are not so often used in colloquial speech. In this post we will stop on grammatical features of headlines.

1) As a rule, headlines represent incomplete sentences, that is, they consist only of keywords, without articles, auxiliary verbs etc.

4 found guilty in London bomb plot – то есть - four people have been found guilty in London bomb plot (четырех человек объявили виновными в подготовке взрывов в Лондоне);

Heavy fighting at Lebanese camp ( горячий бой произошел в ливанском лагере)

Steegmans too strong for Boonen - Steegmans is too strong for Boonen (Стигменс слишком силен для Бунена) [5]

2) In headlines simple times are used: Present Simple used, when event has already occurred or occurs. It can sometimes be used Present Continuous to underline process or change of the present situation. But, besides, it will be used without an auxiliary verb. If in headline says that will occur in future, may be it is the infinitive will be used. (A verb + a participle to) [6]

Pakistani soldiers storm mosque (солдаты Пакистана взяли штурмом мечеть);

Strong earthquake strikes Mexico - Strong earthquake has struck Mexico (сильное землетрясение обрушилось на Мексику);

NASA robot to dig on Mars ( робот НАСА будет раскапывать почву Марса);

Actress Collette expecting child – Actress Collette is expecting child (актриса Колетт ждет ребенка) [5]

3) the translation must retain the same communicative function as the source text. The description and enumeration of speech functions can be found in the work by R. Jakobson, who pointed out the following:

·        informative function, i.e. conveying information: Лавры моего конкурента не дают мне спать. – I am green with envy because of the success of my competitor.

·        emotive function, i.e. expressing the speaker’s emotions: На кой леший мне такой друг? – What on earth do I need such a friend for?

·        poetic function, i.e. aesthetic impact:

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (W.Blake)

Тигр, Тигр, в лесу ночном

Мрачный взгляд горит огнем.

Чья бессмертная рука

Жизнь влила в твои бока? (Пер. К.Филатовой)

These sentences have only one thing in common: general intent of communication, communication aim, or function. At first glance, the source and target texts have no obvious logical connection; they usually designate different situations, have no common semes (i.e. smallest components of meaning), and have different grammar structures.

Chapter III Establishing pragmatic value of publicistic headlines and difficulties of their translation from English into Russian

3.1 Pragmatic functions of publicistic headlines

This research paper is based on studying 100 headlines, 50 of publicistic headlines analyzing in pragmatic functions and 50 headlines difficulties of their translation from English into Russian.

The selected headlines have been divided according to pragmatic functions. Here is given the analysis of Russian and English headlines on the syntactical levels.

Metaphor. transference of names based on the associated likeness between two objects, on the similarity of one feature common to two different entities, on possessing one common characteristic, on linguistic semantic nearness, on a common component in their semantic structures.

Examples:

·                   “COSMIC DANCE”

(Daily Nation, 01.02.10, p.12)

The metaphor “Cosmic Dance” implies unusual dances. The redactor compares “cosmic” and “dance”, because in “Lime club” the dances were unusual, like a cosmic movement.

·                   “BLANKET OF DARKNESS FROM VOLCANO”

(Daily Nation, 05.04.10, p.25)

Blanket of Darkness” is a genuine metaphor, quite unexpected and rather effective. “Blanket of Darkness” implies a present from volcano or volcano eruption in Iceland.

·                   “THE STORM CLOUDS THICKENED OVER UKRAINE”

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