MASS MEDIA LANGUAGE AND ITS ROLE IN TRANSLATION ACTIVITIES (BASED ON ENGLISH MEDIA TEXTS)

Abstract

Reporting information by mass media reflects the current state of public and state systems and relations between them. Since modern Western media are sponsored and controlled by large political parties, associations and corporations, and the authors of texts and messages act as conductors of the ideology of these organizations, in modern media texts a purely informative function (impartial news reporting) is increasingly combined with the intention of influencing the audience with the goal of using both purely linguistic and some extra-linguistic means ‒ to form in the addressee’s mind a certain picture of the modern world, at the behest of the ruling elites. In this light, knowledge of socio-political terminology (SPT), as well as of scientific, technical and humanitarian terms, which inevitably penetrate the media, provided that these terms acquire the status of social or political significance, is of particular importance for translators. On becoming generally known, the terms of various branches of scientific knowledge form, within SPT, special microfields which embrace the concepts of statehood, authorities and public order, administrative-territorial structure of the country, its social structure, systems of party and public associations, organizations; cultural life of society; rights and obligations of society members, international relations, institutions, state associations, their political systems, etc. Translators who track and assimilate the vocabulary of these microfields on a regular basis find it much easier to cope with the translation of pertinent texts. In this article particular attention is paid to the English-language newspaper information style: the headlines of publications, lexical and syntactic features of media texts, the modern tendency of mixing the official style with the colloquial one, means of achieving imagery, etc. The article notes an increasing use of evaluative and expressive vocabulary for certain pragmatic purposes. It also emphasizes that for the successful conduct of interpreting activities, translators need to pay special attention to the assimilation and knowledgeable acquisition of set expressions, clichés, their translation equivalents and analogues ‒ all to the point of automaticity.