CHAPTER ONEINTRODUCTION
1.1 Research background
With economic globalization, China carries out economic exchanges with othercountries in the world more closely and more frequently. Against the background ofChinese economy’s new normal and the slow recovery of world economy, people payclose attention to economic growth. As an important device for people to get access toeconomic information and trade information in the world, economic news has becomea necessary part in people’s daily life. Although major news media in China haveregular correspondents in foreign countries who can collect economic news materialsand cover what is on to readers, it is far from enough to meet audiences’ fast growingneed for information about the world economy. As a result, Chinese media have toadopt a large proportion of foreign economic news published by international economicnews organizations to satisfy domestic audiences. One necessary step before thepublishing is translation. Since English is a worldwide language, it is necessary to drawattention to E-C translation of economic news.Generally speaking, a piece of news is comprised of three parts: a headline, a leadand a body. It is widely acknowledged that a headline is crucial for a piece of newsbecause for one thing, it summarizes the main idea of the whole news, and for another,it needs to draw readers’attention upon which readers decide whether to read the newsfurther. Just as the adage goes: a good beginning is half the battle. Thus, to make aneconomic news headline be able to inform readers directly and play a full role inadvertising the news, journalists adopt a series of language skills to compose it. Forinstance, they pay great attention to word choice, use rhetorical devices in large scaleand embed proverbs, idioms in economic news headlines, which sometimes are culture specific and complicate the translation of the headline. Although achievements havebeen made in the study of news translation, the study on news headline translation hasnot been fully tapped, let alone the translation of economic news headline this specificfield. Therefore, the present study will focus on E-C translation of economic newsheadlines.
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1.2 The rationale of the present study
At the heart of the concept of intertextuality, coined by Kristeva, lies the idea that everytext is inextricably intertwined with other texts. This idea emphasizes that a text is anintertext and meaning is “something which exists between a text and all the other textsto which it refers and relates” (Allen 2000:1), subverting the former idea that a text is aself-contained product, in which meaning resides. Thus to interpret a text is to trace therelations between texts. From the perspective of intertextuality, no text is original andtexts are woven out of threads of other texts. Both reading and writing are processes ofinteracting with prior texts, writers and conventions.Translation is constituted of understanding the source text and formulating thetarget text. From the intertextual perspective, the interpretation of the source textdepends on the interpretation of the related pre-existing texts. The reproduction of thetarget text is a process of absorption, transformation and creation of other texts.Therefore, translation per se is an intertextual practice, as Sakellariou (2015) stated inhis paper “translation involves, inter alia, the relation of at least two textual products”.Furthermore, Farahzad (2009) points out that “in terms of translation,intertextuality operates at two levels”, namely, the intralingual (local) level andinterlingual (global) level.At the former level, the source text “relates to all other textsappearing in its own language” in terms of content and form. At the latter level, thesource text is translated and relates to all other texts written in all different languagesthrough the target text, in the respect of content and genre. Since the source textpreexists its translation, it precedes the target text in time.
