Abstract

“A good headline is half the story”, the medium market competition is more and more intensive. News headlines as refined summary of news reporting, the key to catch the reader’s attention, and the way of creating more attractive newspaper. Therefore, the quality of translation directly decides the accuracy of the information which people may receive. 

A successful translation requires an appropriate, systematic theory as the guidance. Reader’s response and flexible expression are two essential concepts in Nida’s functional equivalence theory. So the translation forms the functional equivalence between two languages from reader’s perspective, combining different cultural background to deal with the cultural difference. 

The purpose of news headlines is to transfer information to the object readers while Nida’s functional equivalence theory also focuses on the importance of reader’s response. The thesis uses some typical examples to express the feasibility of theory to apply to the news headline translation and conclude different news headlines translation strategies to improve the accuracy of English news headlines translation.

Key words: news headlines; functional equivalence; translation strategies

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

1 Introduction-1

2 Literature Review-2

2.1 Previous studies-2

2.2 Innovation of this thesis-3 

3 Features of English News Headlines-4

    3.1 Lexical features-4

    3.2 Grammatical features-5

    3.3 Rhetorical features-6

4 Application of Functional Equivalence-6

    4.1 Brief introduction of functional equivalence theory-6

       4.1.1 Brief introduction of Nida-6

4.1.2 The development of functional equivalence theory-7

    4.2 Application of functional equivalence to news headlines translation-8

4.2.1 Equivalence at lexical level-8

4.2.2 Equivalence at syntactic level-9

4.2.3 Equivalence at rhetorical level-10

4.3 Translation stategies of English news headlines-11

4.3.1 Literal translation-11

4.3.2 Amplification-12

4.3.3 Omission-13

4.3.4 Adaptation-13

5 Conclusion-14

References-16