RHETORICAL STRATEGIC HIERARCHY OF TRANSLATION (A CASE OF UKRAINIAN EQUIVALENTS OF THE HEADLINES OF ENGLISH ONLINE NEWS TEXTS)

Abstract

The goal of the paper is to substantiate the notion of the rhetorical strategic hierarchy of translation drawing on the Ukrainian variants of English headlines. The goal is achieved by the use of the methodology of rhetorical analysis with a special attention to the canons of text-building. The novelty of the article consists in defining the rhetorical strategic hierarchy of Ukrainian translation of English headlines according to the canons: choice of the topic for translation based on human needs at the invention level; content distribution in the positions of attracting, keeping and nudging the reader’s attention at the disposition level; use of a number of translation moves at the elocutionary level. The application of the suggested strategic hierarchy to the analysis of the translations on BBC News Ukraine of the English headlines from the BBC News has revealed that at the invention level the headlines in the source and target languages evoke human needs in a different order adjusting to the audience’s worldview. Moreover, the translated headline usually activates from two up to five human needs forming sequences consisting of several components. At the dispositional level, the original and translated headlines distribute the content according to the attention-attracting, keeping, and nudging positions. The attention-attracting position, placed at the beginning of a headline, includes the naming units denoting the most important information concerning the reader’s needs. The units in the attentionkeeping position related to the predicate or the predicative group characterize the entity named in the attraction. The nudging position winds up a headline, encouraging the reader to turn to the news text as a whole. At the elocutionary level, the naming units of the source headline that appeal to the reader’s needs are translated with the help of moves of equivalence, addition, omission, perspectivation change, categorization, and interlingual metonymy. The equivalence move precisely reproduces the meaning of the units of the source in the target text. The moves of addition and omission of referential content either elaborate on or eliminate bits of information adapting it to the readers’ worldview. The move of perspectivation change is meant to foreground the units performing the nudging function in the original to the attention-attracting position in the target headline. The categorization move provides for the transition of the meaning of the original units relative to three levels: basic, subordinate, and superordinate. The move of interlingual metonymy replaces in the target text the units of the original with the counterparts similar in terms of adjacency or real connection specifying information for the Ukrainian readership.