The Use of Translation Methods When Translating News Headlines

Semantic transformations are inescapable when dealing with news headlines. The incentive for it is a huge amount of the so called headline vocabulary in the English language, often referred to as headlinese, which demands certain modifications when making a translation. Here is a list of words from the «headline slang»: ban, bid, claim, crash, cut, dash, hit, move, pact, plea, probe, quit, quiz, rap, Red, rush, slash. These short words which can be easily inserted into a headline are characterized by a wide field of their use. Thus, bid is not only 'предложение','заявка','попытка', but also 'шаг','инициатива', 'усилие’; hit —not only 'наносить удар','причинять ущерб','попадать в цель',but 'критиковать','обрушиваться на кого-либо, разносить в пух и в прах' ; pact — not only 'пакт,соглашение,договор', but 'сделка', 'договоренность','сговор'; probe — not only 'зондирование', but 'любое следствие,расследование','проверка' as well; quit —not only 'покидать','прекращать', but also 'уезжать','выводить войска', 'эвакуироваться'; quiz — not only производить опрос',but 'допрашивать','интервьюировать,задавать вопросы'. It is important to point out that such words have already almost utterly replaced their synonyms in news headlines. Thus, ban taken the place of forbid and prohibit; rap — of criticize, reprimand, interrogate. Wide semantics of headline words demand context-conditioned transformations in the translation. In the majority of cases concrete definition (hyponimic transformation) takes place in the Russian variant. The accurate sense of the headline is as usual revealed in the beginning of the article: "Minebea Fous Trafalgar-Glen Bid"(The Independent). Comp. The article’s outset : Minebea Corp, of Japan, the world's largest maker of precision bearings, has foiled a hostile takeover attempt by a US-British financial group, the Kyodo News Service reported Friday. Here the outset takes away the polysemy of the headline word replacing it by the corresponding equivalent which is included into the concretizing and defining context : Trafalgar-Glen Bid — a hostile takeover attempt by a US-British financial group. In that way the translation may sound as follows: :"Провал попытки англо-американской монополии поглотить японскую фирму" or "Провал попытки подчинить японскую фирму англо-американскому контролю".

Polysemic interprepretation of a news headline can also be conditioned by the use of certain syntactic constructions, nominal phrases in particular, which can be interpreted in different ways, for instance : "Benn Blasts Tory Nuclear Cover-up".(The Times). It is impossible to translate the phrase "Тоrу Nuclear Cover-up” without the context. Alternative versions are possible because of the bearing word of the phrase – cover up – derived from the phrasal verb to cover up -- 'тщательно скрывать,'покрывать кого-либо'. But the main difficulty originates from the elliptic character of the whole phrase. The clue to the accurate interpretation of the phrase lies in the article’s outset : Labour MP Тоnу Benn last night accused the government of "totally misleading"the British people about nuclear power. Thus, cover-up means here not merely “утаивание”, but also “дезинформация”, and the omitted element in the nominal phrase above is power ("Tory nuclear cover-up"—"Tory nuclear power cover-up"). The following variants of translation are possible: "Бенн обвиняет тори в дезинформации по вопросам атомной энергии" or "Бенн разоблачает дезинформацию тори по вопросам атомной энергии". In the instance above the main difficulty connected with the interpretation of the nominal phrase is determined by its elliptic structure. In the following news headline elliptic structure is combined with the polysemy of semantic relations between the phrase components: “Power Station Action Starts Today" (“The Times”). In this case power station can be realated to action as : 1) the agent, 2) the object, 3) the adverbial modifier of place. What is more, the phrase might be supposed to be characterized by semantic incompletness. The answers to these questions are to be found in the set-out: Today's Start of national industrial action in Britain's power stations forms the background to the biennial Conferences of the electricians' union in Scarborough. Hence power station is related to action as an adverbial modifier and the element omitted is the word combination industrial action 'забастовка'. Thus the Russian variants may be as follows: "Забастовки на английских электростанциях"или "Английские электрики бастуют".

It is important to notice the essential difference between Russian and English news headlines. This difference mainly denotes the extent to which the article contents are reflected in the headline. The authors of the British and American news article keep to the following principle when creating headlines: : "Headlines should tell the story”. Thus a headline is the compressed to the limit variant of the main text :"Dusseldorfs State Gallery Proves a Mausoleum for Mummified Modernism"; "First Chicago Bank Says Profit Rose 58% for Initial Period." (The Sun). The Russian news headlines are based on a different principle: as a rule they place an emphasis on one element of the text contents – “Захват заложников в Беслане” («Вечерний Минск)» . In such cases additional information is required because the method of literal translation does not guarantee an adequate English variant.