Language features of german newspaper headlines and specifics of their translation

Abstract

Newspaper headlines have quite a number of grammatical, syntactic and stylistic features connected with their communicative functions. A headline is regarded as a specific communicative and linguistic unit, a type of a text with content and language features, which is of undoubted interest for a philological research. The article is aimed at analyzing the language structure and the peculiarities of German newspaper headlines, and their description to be considered in translation from German into Russian and in reverse. The research, with continuous sampling methods used and followed by a descriptive method, classification and generalization of the materials, included more than 1500 headlines from four German online-publications targeted at a mass reader. The syntactic peculiarities of a German newspaper headline are connected with its length and the economy of language means. It finds its reflection in the use of simple declarative sentences, elliptical constructions, nominal phrases, etc. The grammatical features of a German newspaper headline are characterized by a possible omission of such parts of the sentence as articles, linking verbs, conjunctions, possessive and personal pronouns, etc. The stylistic peculiarities of headlines are connected with expressivity, creation of emotional impact on the reader, to which end idiomatic phrases, authors’ stylistic figures, precedent phrases, proverbs and sayings are used. The article manifests the main difficulties a translator may face in translating German newspaper headlines. The results of the research may be of use for a further study of a newspaper discourse, in theoretical and practical classes on media text translation.