Headlinese 101

A curious phenomenon has recently grabbed my attention as I was teaching journalism students. Although I have always been aware of it, it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I was circumstantially obliged to delve deeper into its analysis. I have thereby learnt a couple of interesting truths such as, for example, the fact that newspaper headlines are never written by the authors of the articles they introduce as they have to follow a set of strict formal and conceptual rules – they need to be short and adjust perfectly to the newspapers’ space requirements and obviously attract potential buyers or persuade people to read articles withing the newspaper they have purchased. But apart from these obvious market-led goals, what is most interesting about headlines is the type of language used by their authors – the translators of headlinese, as the "language" is dubbed by some.

A quick glance at some Spanish language headlines reveals a specific use of language that employs short and precise present tense sentences.

La OTAN niega que Rusia haya retirado sus tropas de la frontera con Ucrania

El Gobierno prevé un crecimiento de hasta el 1,5% para este año

Marcelo se rompe y no estará ante el Dortmund

Simplicity is also rule number one in English headlines, yet it is true they go a step further making the message even more compact. A crash course in headline-writing would probably look like this:

1)          Remove articles and unnecessary grammar/lexical elements

2)          Use present tense, gerunds, past participles or plain noun phrases

3)          Use headlinese vocabulary (there are special lists of word used in headlines only)
4)     Use  "to + V" instead of the future tense
5)     It can never start with the article "a" (as argued by Weir 2009)

Migrants face 'living hell' in Greece

Stem cell scientist 'faked evidence'

Not only do headlinese translators, who often hold special headline writing positions in the media, go to great lengths to shorten their messages; they also use humour and word play with numerous cultural references which may make their work impenetrable to non-experts or non-native speakers.

Torrential rain in most arias. (about an open-air opera concert, a word play base on the homophony areas/arias; a textbook example)

  

Sometimes headlinese lends itself to ambiguous interpretations due to the flexibility of the English language when switching between different grammatical categories/parts of speech codified by one word - a phenomenon called conversion (e.g. cut can be both a noun and a verb). The ease with which nouns can play the role of adjectives when placed before a noun doesn’t help. Nor does the fact that those noun+noun lists are not limited by anything but the perceptual and anaylitical skills of the speakers. For example, what does world trade centre exactly mean: is it a trade centre that is unique in the world ([world [trade centre]) or is it a centre of world trade ([[world trade] centre]? The difference may be subtle, yet the first version suggests there is only one, while the second doesn’t. Surprisingly, Centro de comercio mundial receives 401.000 Google search results, while centro mundial de comercio - 329.000. So most people seem not to care.

And how exactly should we interpret these examples taken from a webpage than gathers funny headline botches:

Eye drops off shelf

Squad helps dog bite victim

Dealers will hear car talk at noon

Two Soviet ships collide - one dies 

Does number 1 talk about eye drops that were taken off the shelf [[eye drops] [off shelf]] or one eye that fell off the shelf [[eye] [drops off shelf]]. Or in number 2: whom does the squad actualy help: the victim or the dog? Are cars talking in 3 or is it about a talk in/about the car? Is one correferential with ship in 4 or is there actually a person involved?

Some more nice instances from todays online press:

White House's 'Cuban Twitter' denial

Services sector growth eases

Supreme Court Strikes Down Overall Political Donation Cap

I'll leave it at that. At the end of the day, the Internet's full of examples. 

NOTE: All examples have been taken from the cited sources, except for the world trade centre bit, which has always bothered me personally.

Sources and further reading:

Weir (2009): Article Drop in English Headlinese [online] http://people.umass.edu/aweir/Weir-2009-headlinese.pdf
http://funnies.paco.to/Headlines.html
http://www.theguardian.co.uk
http://www.elpais.es
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlinese
http://www.uiltexas.org/files/academics/journalism/headline-overview.pdf