Translational Strategies and Procedures used in Sierra Maestra Newspaper when translating Headlines from Spanish to English

Many people believe that translation is an easy thing and all you have to do is to change words from the source text into the equivalent words of a target text. However, this is not true since some phrases, if translated literally, would make no sense. Translation is a very complicated process which has to consider many factors - the genre and the style of the original text, the translator's competence, and the timeline allocated to the project and many more.

The authentic birth of journalism was in the XVIII century and its practice can be considered like one of more significant results of the Illustration. However, in spite of the fact that journalism had been since his birth linked to translation, there are not enough signs of concern regarding this matter in journalistic investigation as well as in linguistics.

In fact, today’s accomplished studies instead of treating the analysis of journalistic translation like a professional practice are rather focused in a didactic use of translated texts.

Journalistic texts are frequently used whether in the second language teaching (English in this case) or whether in the translation introduction or General translation (into one's native language or into a foreign language) courses.

This article faces the analysis and assessment of strategies and translating procedures used when translating into English the headlines of the Sierra Maestra online newspaper.

The starting point is the initial premise which general tendency is to adapt the information to the target reader’s expectations, avoiding in most of the cases the situational context of the entry information or the cultural elements that come into game in the news of the source language.

Reason why in this article, the author carry out a (linguistic, cultural and translation) interdisciplinary analysis to shed light on the difficulties involved in the translation of newspaper articles in general, and titles or headlines in particular, taking as a starting point the translation from Spanish to English of some articles previously published in the journal Sierra Maestra in digital.

After skimming the basic techniques, strategies and procedures concepts from a translation point of view, the author happen to explain the peculiarities of the news headlines structure written in Spanish and in English as well, adopting an interdisciplinary approach that includes not only the linguistic-discursive dimension, but also the contributions of the Cultural Studies.

News headlines have from a translation point of view, some undeniable family resemblances if we focus on the analysis of the strategies used in translation.

They are translated literally in most cases, but always undergo a process of naturalization when translated into English.

This study, despite its limitations in the number of cases analyzed, intended to show the coexistence of different types of factors in the analysis of process and product of translation of headlines translated from Spanish to English in the digital press.

But above all, its importance lies where it can be seen in the approach of  the case study from an interdisciplinary perspective, that not only uses the comparison of linguistic resources in both languages ​, but aims to go further, echoing contributions to cultural studies related to the Cultural Turn of Translation to understand the complex intralingua and intercultural communication phenomena that occurs when translating  newspaper headlines .

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