The main goal of newspaper is to inform the reader on the socially important affairs. The language of newspapers combines the element of many styles. However proportion of the words and constructions typical of the spoken kind of language is larger in the English newspaper style than in Ukrainian. The latter is still rather oriented toward the literary written usage and respective stylistic transformations should be made while rendering and English text into Ukrainian.
The vocabulary of both English and Ukrainian newspapers possesses some specific features discerning it from the other genres. Apart from the common literary word-stock it includes a number of distinctive elements that fall into the following sub-types:
· Special politic, scientific words;
· Neologisms;
· Vast number of proper names;
· Abbreviations and acronyms (NATO);
· Allusions on the well-known sayings, titles, idioms, literary characters etc.
· The average news report is the product of many hands. News items are opened with an introductory paragraph, to so-called INTRO. The head paragraph both summarizes and begins to tell the story. This paragraph is also the usual source of the headline written not by source journalist but by one of the sub-editors.
· LEAD – a structural element that covers the answers to the basic 6 questions: who, when, where, what, how, why. The original source of the story is given either in a byline or built into the context. The standard sequence of elements in English message + source. By contrast in Urkainian tradition the sequence will be source + message:
e.g. the next round of voting will take place tomorrow, the UPI reports.
The best known feature of news-reporting is the telegraphic style of the headline. The headline is critical, summarizing and drawing attention to the story. English newspapers tend to pursue the principle: “Headlines should tell the story”.
They must be economical with words. The reporter chooses a special vocabulary, the short words (mostly polysemantic) because they developed the ability to suit all sorts of context. They are given preference before their synonyms that have more syllables:
e.g. bag, to ban, to cut, to rap, flash
These words developed a number of meanings, typical mostly for the news-media style.
Since English headlines pursue the principle of telling the story they’re predicative in terms of syntactic structure. There is a tendency of giving the English headlines rather verbal than nominative structure: e.g. Flood hits Scotland.
By contrast, in Ukrainian the preference is given in most cases to nominative structures neglecting some aspects of the problem discussed in the article
In many cases the grammar must be transformed to conform to the prevailing tendency in the particular language. To capture the reader’s attention many editors try to make their headlines catchy and well-designed. To this purpose they use a variety of expressive means.
e.g. Does hard work causes heart attack?
Stylistically transformed idioms, proverbs or set phrases: e.g. Crime without punishment
Idioms are used both in transformed and in traditional shape in the headlines. Sometimes they serve as a means of pun. It must be kept in mind that the headlines are in many cases not translated but substituted for the new ones coined according to stylistic rules of the target language.
Another feature of the English headlines is the ample use of acronyms. Their meaning is not always quite clear to the average reader. However, the context of the headline or the following story explains their meaning. Some of the acronyms may be quite unusual and not even registered in the respected dictionaries.
Tense-forms. In headline preference is given to non-perfect tense-forms. The recent events are described with present simple: e.g. Iraq rejects allegations. Headlines give an impression of bringing reader chronologically closer to the event and suggest the idea of freshness of the news. Past Indefinite is used to describe the events in the distant past, especially when this is an indication of certain moment in the past: e.g. Businessman disappeared 2 years ago.
Further events are commonly rendered with the help of the infinitive:
e.g. America to resume testing; world’s population to be 7 milliards
Infinitive is also used for rendering Ukrainian adverbial or prepositional constructions defining future events: e.g. перед зустріччю 7 у Токіо – seven to meet in Tokyo
Headlines often use gerund which has no parallel Ukrainian category and mostly transformed into noun or verbal forms
The same refers to infinitive used not only for rendering the future but in the nominative sentences as well:
e.g. to return with victory – перемога буде за нами
News items and headlines widely use the attributive nouns classes as an effective means of making a phrase concise: e.g. Drugs case layer sacked = the layer involved in the drug’s case was sacked
Translating such constructions may require implying some phrases including those of omission and addition.
The headline style is highly elliptical. The auxiliary verbs in the passive voice are regularly omitted in the present: e.g. kidnapped baby found
The auxiliary words are also omitted in the interrogative sentences: e.g. hit by pyramid?
Articles are regularly omitted also. Another peculiarity of headlines – possibility to leave out the subject of the sentence: e.g. can’t wait to meet my dad.
… to be continued
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