Translation of News Headlines: A Case of English Headlines Rendered into Arabic, Kurdish and Persian

Abstract

This paper explores the translation of news headlines across certain journalistic cultures, specifically focusing on headlines translated from English into Arabic, Kurdish, and Persian. Headlines are an extraordinary type of text, which are considered a separate genre on their own. Since a headline is an entrance to the news details, journalists have to utilize different techniques to make the headline concise, effective, and eye-catching to the reader. In translating news headlines, these features should be attained so that translated headlines achieve their intended aim in the target language. To do so, journalist-translators ought to employ a variety of translation procedures. This paper postulates that journalist-translators have to be equipped with the necessary translation skills and apply multiple translation procedures to be able to translate news headlines effectively, as the use of a single translation procedure is generally insufficient to produce an effective translation. Moreover, the paper argues that this trend is not restricted to a certain pair of languages but the postulation is true of news headlines translated between the aforementioned language pairs and, by extension, any other languages across different journalistic cultures. The results show that over a dozen of translation procedures have been implemented in rendering headlines in each language pair concerned. The results thus confirm the validity of the postulation put forward in this paper.