On the Translation of News Headlines from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

MA Bin FENG Chen

Yancheng Teachers University, Yancheng, 224051, China

[Abstract] With the further development of reform and opening up policy, the communications between China and other nations have been increasingly growing.The news plays an important role in promoting China's policy as well as informing the social development to the world.This thesis begins with the main features of the news headline, and then gives a brief introduction to the development of Relevance Theory.And it also analyses the applications of the theory to the translation of the news headline and then offers some translation strategies for the improvement of the translation of news headlines.By means of literature research and quantitative analysis, it concludes that the translator should keep the cognitive environment in mind and adopt the translation strategy of the literal or free translation according to the features of specific source text in order to achieve the optimal relevance.

[Keywords] news headline; Relevance Theory; translation strategies

Living in the global village, people are now surrounded by overwhelming message explosions in nearly all aspects of life.As the communications among different nations have been increasing dramatically, the role that the news has played in conveying information can no longer be ignored.

According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, “news” is defined as “reports of recent events that appear in newspapers or on television or radio” and the ‘headline’ is defined as “the title of a newspaper article printed in large letters, especially at the top of the page.” The headline is an important part of the news because with its unique linguistic features, the news headline is usually designed to mirror the main content of the story and intends to catch the interests of the readers.Furthermore, a successful translation of the headline acts as a bridge between China and the world that can help to enhance the efficiency of the communication among them.In view of the significance of the news headline and its translation, the purpose of current research is to examine the translation of the news headline from the perspective of Gutt’s relevance theory and explore the translation strategies of the news headline to guide the translators to render successful translated works.

The translation of news headlines has become a research topic for a long time, and many scholars from home and abroad have devoted themselves to the research of it.In the overseas research, R.M.K.Sinha (2006) from India proposed some strategies to solve the problem of translating news headings from English to Hindi in an article Translating News Headlines from English to Hindi (Zeng, 2009).Afterwards some scholars concentrated on the news headline translation by means of machine translation such as Takehiko Yoshimi and Ichiko Sata.Liu Miqing and Xu Mingwu studied the translation of the news and the news headline, which has a far-reaching influence on the study of the news and the news headline.And Gao Shukai studied the translation of news headlines from the perspective of journalism (Zeng, 2009).Other domestic scholars do their research mainly from the perspective of linguistic and cultural features of the news headline.And still some other scholars study the news headline translation through the application of translation theories such as the theory proposed by Peter Newmark.

Cognition is the function of our brain to perceive the world.It is a conscious mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, inference, and creative thinking, etc.The process of translation and interpretation are cognitive process and have drawn attention of scholars in the fields of translation and psychology.They used concepts and methods in cognitive science to reveal the internal processes of translation and interpreting.

Gutt is the pioneer scholar to begin a cognitive approach to translation with his monograph and ph.D.dissertation titled Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context (1991).Next year, he wrote his second book Relevance Theory: A Guide to Successful Communication in Translation (1992).He has become influential by writing articles on cognitive approach to translation (Ma, 2009: 305).

Viewing translation as lingual communication and interlingual interpretation, Gutt developed the theoretic account for the translation process by applying relevance theory that highlights the inferential process and the importance of context.The theoretical background for applying relevance theory to translation studies attributes to relevance theory by Sperber and Wilson(1986/1995), which has emerged since 1980s in the field of linguistic philosophy in the West.It provides a cognitive frame of reference for pragmatic communication and accounts for cognition and language communication.The principle of relevance is thus a cognitive and communicative principle.Relevance is the universal goal of cognition while cognition is the necessary condition of achieving the relevance.

The translation involves three processes: first, the original author conveys his or her idea and information to the translator; second, the translator forms his or her schema by inference; third, the translator conveys the schema to readers of source language and the text of target language comes into being (Cheng, 2012).In the process of translation, the translator acts as a communicator and the process of translation can be regarded as that of facilitating-communication.The communication-facilitating role of translation is determined by the similarity between the notion of translation held by the translator and the one held by the audience.

As is recognized by many Chinese translators, literal translation is an important translating method.As long as the original meaning or style is in accordance with the expressive manner of Chinese, it is essential to give priority to literal translation.Three translation examples are worth mentioning here:

(1) Obama Removes Weapons Freeze Against Egypt

奥巴马解除对埃及的武装禁运

(2) Singaporeans and World Leaders Gather for Final Farewell to Lee Kuan Yew

新加坡民众与多国政要送别李光耀

(3) New Harvard Policy Bans Teacher-Student Relations

哈佛大学新政策禁止师生恋

As we can infer from the first example, the English text gives the audience explicit contextual information about the news event.It uses a relatively simple grammatical structure containing the subject, the predicate and the object which summarizes what Obama’s decision is about.The background of the second news headline is about the founding father of Singapore - Lee Kuan Yew.The headline is full of informative and emotional intention,highlighting the special status that Lee Kuan Yew enjoys in Singapore.The similar grammatical structure is adopted in the third example which introduces the major content of Harvard’ policy.

In many cases, we can also add or reduce some information in order to convey more vividly and reach the optimal relevance.

(4) Lanshu Chen on Dining Well On the Road

台湾女大厨陈岚舒谈旅行中的美食

(5) Gloves Fit for a Queen, With Hands-On Craftsmanship

In the fourth example, the translation adds the background information of “台湾女大厨” that explains her nationality, gender and profession.Because this added information closely connects with the main content of the news headline, and it helps the readers to know more about the chef in a specific cognitive environment.However, the fifth example only employs a phrase to summarize the main idea of the news headline by omitting the adverbial elements.According to the rule of briefness, this method highlights the most important information but deletes the less important aspect which is fit for the cognition of the target readers.

The five Chinese translations as mentioned above successfully correspond with the source language style as well as the contextual effects since the optimal relevance of each is achieved.If the original English headline contains enough contextual information or cognitive environment that means the target text readers will easily achieve the contextual effect as that of the source text readers, we will adopt the literal translation strategy.Meanwhile, it takes the least processing effort for target text readers to understand the title because the informative intention and communicative intention have been well conveyed.

With regard to Chinese people’s expressive habits, we prefer four-character idioms and proverbs that contain profound meanings with informative and communicative intentions.

(6) Bones, Broth, Bliss

不可思议，骨头汤成流行饮品

(7) Price Range for Apple Watch: $349 to Over $10,000

千呼万唤始出来，苹果公布多款智能手表细节

(8) Older Really Can Mean Wiser

“姜还是老的辣”有了科学依据

(9) Delight or Dread as Euro Falls

欧元下跌，有人欢喜有人愁

The eighth example gives us the sense of freshness and poetic feeling by using alliteration and rhyme, but the English news headline is difficult to translate into Chinese with the similar rhetorical devices.However the idiom “不可思议” and the four-character phrase “流行饮品” vividly convey the literal meaning and the intended assumptions in rhythm.The phrase “千呼万唤始出来” in the ninth example is quoted from a poem written by Bai Juyi and has been particularly popular among Chinese people.Here it emphasizes that the consumers have expected for a very long time before the publicity of the price of the Apple watch.“姜还是老的辣” is a famous proverb in Chinese and people have become quite familiar with it.The “老” and “辣” respectively symbolizes “older” and “wiser”.With the use of the Chinese proverb, the translation delivers the informative as well as the communicative intentions.Similar contextual effect can be achieved in the eleventh example by the adoption of the common saying “有人欢喜有人愁” because “欢喜” and “愁” are translated into “delight” and “dread”.

In the thesis the researchers have explored the translation of news headlines from the perspective of relevance theory and provided new insights into the process of news headline translation.This thesis has introduced the main functions and features of English news headlines, given a general introduction to the relevance theory as well as its application in translation and discussed the major strategies for translation of news headline under the guidance of relevance theory.Based on the study in this thesis, we get the following findings:

First, the good translation of a news headline is one that can help the reader to obtain the maximal contextual effects with the minimal processing efforts.Thus, the translator should keep the cognitive environment of the target text readers in mind.Second, when it comes to translation strategies, we should adopt literal or free translation with specific techniques, such as word addiction, word reduction, the transformation and the idiom use, etc.Furthermore, the selection is dependent on the features of the source text.So the translator should understand not only the informative intention but also the communicative intention of the source text.

As for the suggestions for future studies on this subject, there is much room for the future research since this thesis is far from satisfactory due to some limitations.For example,we need a further and comprehensive analysis on some of the strategies for the translation of the news headlines, however different media agencies have different translation versions of the same news headline.