Preservation and transformation translation strategies in Lithuanian translations of headlines in National Geographic articles

Abstract

The study discusses the application of preservation and transformation translation strategies in the process of translating headlines of articles in the National Geographic Lithuanian translations from the source language [English]. The choice of the given strategies has been justified by the findings of the former study of the present authors [JankauskaitÎ &DaugÎlaitÎ 2014], according to which, these are the most common techniques employed by translators. The authors studied 155 headlines in three English and the corresponding Lithuanian issues of the journal. A contrastive descriptive analysis has been employed as a research method to compare English [SL] and Lithuanian [TL] structures on the lexical and syntactical level. Preservation makes up 84 cases in all examined headlines. The latter technique is observed when an item is translated directly or is maintained as in ST only with some phonological changes. Transformation is employed in 25 headlines. Transformation is an alteration or distortion of the original [Davies 2003: 86]. A translator decides to use this strategy when it is difficult to understand the real meaning of an item of the ST but which cannot be left out.