Overview

This work is a comparative descriptive analysis of seventy English language headlines and their Arabic translations gathered from the Arab national and international press and news agencies over the period of January 1, 2002 through August 1, 2002. While headline translation has received some attention from scholars, only a small amount of the literature deals specifically with the translation of English language headlines into Arabic. The ideological, political, national, and cultural basis of the source and target societies significantly affects the mode of translation and the message conveyed. These discourse factors, which almost always divide along an East-West line, are generally most evident in the first expression of a news headline which often functions as or designates the headline actor or agent. Other headline aspects such as headline function, content, and length are also controlled by the news discourse factors deemed most important to the dominant group. Lexical selection, style, and rhetoric in news headline writing and translation is not incidental or arbitrary but deliberate which makes these aspects of news headline discourse a portal through which hidden opinions or ideologies may surface. Translators do not follow identifiable strategies in their translations. Instead, general Skopos Theory allows the translator to make the source text headline more effective by the appropriate lexical style and rhetorical devices applied in the translated headline. The relevance of discourse analysis extends beyond the examination of individual words or isolated sentences. The macro and micro comparative analysis of isolated words and sentences is incomplete without consideration of discourse influenced transformational strategies that shape and guide the translation of news headlines.

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In a practical way, the study addresses... how national, political, cultural, religious, and socio-ideological views of the source and target audience affect not only the function of press headlines but also their content and even length. - Prof. Basil Hatim American University of Sharjah To my knowledge this is the most systematic, most explicit, most detailed and theoretically best informed study of headlines to date. It is not just a comparative study of English and Arabic headlines, or a study of translation practices. - Prof. Teun van Dijk Pompeu Fabra University

"""In a practical way, the study addresses... how national, political, cultural, religious, and socio-ideological views of the source and target audience affect not only the function of press headlines but also their content and even length."" - Prof. Basil Hatim American University of Sharjah ""To my knowledge this is the most systematic, most explicit, most detailed and theoretically best informed study of headlines to date. It is not just a comparative study of English and Arabic headlines, or a study of translation practices."" - Prof. Teun van Dijk Pompeu Fabra University"""

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