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The Theory and Practice of Translation NEW.doc
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14.2. Grammatical peculiarities of translating newspaper articles

As was stressed above, an English news article is structured differently from a Russian one since it attaches a special significance to the leading paragraph which determines its functions, semantic features and peculiarities in form that have to be taken into account in translation.

From the functional point of view the lead is closely connected with the headline as it expands upon the gist of the information given in the headline.

Semantically, many words in the headline and the lead are synonymous, though there are conspicuous differences between them, namely, in the lead the words tend to be longer (cf. bid – protest, ban – prohibition) and more narrow and concrete in meaning. Through repeated use short headline units become cliches which are easily recognizable. At the same time they preserve their emotional force in a headline: being fuzzy in their nature such units are capable of implying a greater amount of information. Besides headline vocabularyt may serve as a basis for creating various stylistic devices. In addition to examples given above we can refer to some more,

Car-makers drive up profits (pun)

Crash scene like a battlefield (simile)

Ministers read the riot act by PM (metaphor)

In form a translator has to be aware of a number of restrictions which are still active in English newspapers. The formal (grammatical) demands of translation observed in the leads are as follows:

1) arrange the content of the lead according to the following pattern:

Who?- (did) what? (how?) where? when?-why?

This pattern is known in English Grammar books as SVO(M)PT or the 6-Wh- rule and it helps to structure information in a sentence. In Russian a typical pattern is different:

when?- where? – (did) what? – who?,

that is the TPV/p-S pattern is typical of a communicative structure of a Russian sentence with its rhematic position at the end, thematic elements opening a sentence.

In view of this difference a translator has to apply the transformation of restructuring, i.e. changes in the word order, e.g. Вчера во время встречи президента Франции Николя Саркози и президента России Дмитрия Медведева было подписано новое Соглашение о сроках вывода российских миротворческих сил из Грузии. – French President Nicolas Sarcozy and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev met yesterday to agree on a new timetable for withdrawing Russian peacekeeping troops from Georgia. .

2) Refer to sources of information in English using the patterns: M (message) – S (source) instead of the Russian pattern: S (source) – M (message). Alongside changes in word order apply other grammatical transformations:

как заявил X ---- X said / X is reported as saying

как сообщается из X --- it is reported from X

как сообщают из X ---- it is reported from X

согласно заявлению X ---- according to X

E.g. Как сообщает источник в министерстве внутренних дел Ингушетии, в среду в крупнейшем городе республики Назране был застрелен кузен президента республики. – A cousin of the Ingush President was shot dead in the republics largest city Nazran on Wednesday, a source in the republics Interior Ministry said..

3) Change adverbial modifiers in Russian di-rhematic utterances into a grammatical subject of an English sentence, e.g. В совместном заявлении подчёркнуто, что стороны согласны расширять обмены в области культуры и образования. – The joint statement stresses that both sides have agreed to step up cultural and educational contacts and exchanges.

4) Leave out redundant information from a Russian sentence for the sake of compressing information in an English utterance, e.g. Согласно данным ВОЗ, главным фактором смертности являются сердечно-сосудистые заболевания. – According to the WHO statistics, cardio-vascular diseases are the No. 1 killer.

When translating from English into Russian a translator has to resort to the lexico-grammatical transformation of addition in keeping with the norms of the newspaper writing in Russian, e.g.

The settlement may be considered to be of primary importance to a number of home industries. – Можно считать, что заключение этого соглашения будет иметь решающее значение для ряда отраслей отечественной промышленности.

The example shows that there is a syntactic change in the type of sentence (simple sentence > complex sentence) and a greater number of notional words compared to functional words in the Russian sentence (12 units against 3) while in the English sentence the correlation of notional and functional words is opposite (8 to 8).

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