II. The Structure of the Newspaper Item

I. Newspaper headlines

Russian and English news texts are characterized by a number of common features, namely:

1) a wide stylistic range (different styles depending on the theme of the article);

2) preference for compressed sentences.

But when comparing English and Russian headlines, you may trace a number of distinctive features, which are naturally reflected in translation.

1. Thus, in English headlines verb-phrases are preferably used.

Ex: Cat goddess discovered in ruins of temple

In this headline the verb to be and the articles are left out.

N.B. You should bear in mind that in the English headlines the articles and the so called function words (служебное слово) are omitted.

So the restored sentence would be:

The cat goddess has been discovered in the ruins of a temple

Ex: British protesters arrested

The British protesters were arrested

2. The actions which took place in the past are usually expressed by the verbs in the present tenses.

Ex: Pay gap faces security = Данные о разрыве в размере заработной платы не будут оглашаться

The context: Companies are to be given some immunity (неприкосновенность, иммунитет) from investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission if they publish details on pay disparity (неравенство) between men and women.

3. The actions that will take place in the future are usually expressed by infinitive.

Ex: Britain and France to sign defense treaty

Hero of wartime elephant ‘Dankirk’ to be honored

4. The Russian headlines favor noun-phrases.

So to translate them correctly you should resort to some syntactic transformation.

Ex: Переброска американских солдат в Афганистан = Американских солдат перебрасывают в Афганистан

The American soldiers are being airlifted to Afghanistan

But it is not a headline yet. We should omit the verb to be and the definite article.

The American soldiers airlifted to Afghanistan

1. The title or headline

2. The lead (краткое изложение газетной статьи (помещается непосредственно перед статьёй))

3. The article itself

2. The lead usually contains the summary of the most essential and interesting facts of the article. And the detailed account of the material follows the lead.

In former times people used to consider that the lead had to contain one sentence answering 6 questions:

1) Who?

2) When?

3) Where?

4) Why?

5) What?

6) How?

Nowadays this rule is not so strict. The lead should answer these questions, but not necessarily all of them.

3. The compression of the text is one of the most important facts, which should be taken into account when translating newspaper article.

One and the same idea can be expressed in various ways, but on the whole laconism is typical of the newspaper style.

In the majority of manuals for journalists in the USA and Great Britain laconism is considered as one of the demands for newspaper style, but some investigations prove that the volume of any translation is bigger than that of the origin.

The tendency to the widening of the volume of the text translated should be balanced by the tendency to compression if we want to create the text meeting the norms of the newspaper international style.

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