Newspaper and Publicist Styles

These styles possess many features in common yet texts belonging to these styles present considerable variety and may be divided into two groups: texts containing information and texts commenting on it.

News in brief and information articles (newspaper style proper) are devoid of emotive and individual colouring, hence wide use of impersonal passive and Nominative with the infinitive constructions which are also impersonal in character. Clichés form an outstanding feature of this type of text. They are characterized by a considerable compactness of form which is due to want of space. Condensation in its extreme form is especially apparent in headlines and that is the reason why headlines have their own structural peculiarities: omission of auxiliaries, a wide use of verbals, of attributive models, etc., all making for compactness.

Articles containing commentaries (publicist style proper) chief among them editorials, possess a distinct emotive colouring. Their vocabulary is literary and their syntax is rather complicated. Their objective is to influence public opinion, not to inform the reader but to convince him that the paper’s interpretation is correct and to bring him round to its point of view, to condition his views and opinions. This fact explains the use of various expressive means.

Eleven Die in Zagreb Floods

Eleven people are known to have died and tens of thousands are homeless after floods which struck Zagreb on Monday.

This brief note possesses a number of peculiar features which have no equivalents in Russian newspaper style: the use of the Present tense instead of the Past; the use of the Nominative Infinitive construction (a secondary predicate according to L.Barchudarov); clichés which are not identical with the Russian clichés. This being the case, several transformations have been resorted to in the translation of the above brief note.

Наводнение в Загребе

Согласно сообщениям, вчера в Загребе в результате наводнения погибло одиннадцать человек, и десятки тысяч остались без крова.

The information contained in the original text is rendered equivalently, no sign item has been omitted but the norms of the Russian newspaper style have caused the omission of some lexical units and the use of substitutions.

Commenting articles, as has been pointed out, bear a distinctive emotive colouring due to the expressive means in them, though these means are hardly ever original. The use of trite metaphors, for example, is more frequent in English newspapers than in Russian papers. That is why trite metaphors are not infrequently substituted or even omitted in translation.

The metaphor used in the following example is toned down in the translated text.

The Industrial Relations Bill is an attempt to slit the throat of trade-unions.

Законопроект об отношениях в промышленности – это попытка задушить профсоюзы.

Although the metaphor “to slit the throat” has a corresponding equivalent in the Russian phrase перерезать горло Russian usage does not admit the combination перерезать горло профсоюзам.

That is why the translation substitutes the less picturesque verb задушить which expresses the same meaning and is traditionally used in similar contexts as a sort of cliché.

Different expressive devices (allusions among them) are used in newspaper articles to condition the reader’s views and opinions.

The phrase “the winter of discontent” from Richard III by Shakespeare is widely used in different political contexts and is often adapted to the situation, e.g.

Some Trade-Unions warn the Government that it will be a winter of discontent.

The definite article has been substituted by the indefinite, and the possessive pronoun is omitted.

In the following example the adaptation is more conspicuous: the word summer is substituted for winter and the possessive pronoun is also omitted.

In former French Africa it was the summer of discontent. One hundred thousand citizens of Chad, led by their president, took to the wind-blown streets of Fort Lamy to protest French involvement in Chad’s internal affairs.

В бывшей французской Африке лето было тревожное. Сто тысяч граждан республики Чад с президентом во главе вышли на занесенные песком улицы Форт Лами в знак протеста против вмешательства Франции во внутренние дела республики.

In this case the pragmatic aspect of translation comes to the fore. The Russian reader may not recognize the allusion and it will not call forth the necessary response on his part, whereas the allusions, even in its altered form, is familiar to the English reader. This consideration justifies its omission.