Olena Bondarenko
National Technical
University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”
The sociolinguistic study of
journalistic genre and social media
Sociolinguistics is the study of language in use. With special focus on
the relationships between language and society, sociolinguistics addresses the
forms and functions of variation across social groups and across the range of
communicative situations in which speakers and writers deploy their verbal
repertoires.
In short, sociolinguistics examines discourse as it is constructed and co-constructed,
shaped and reshaped, in the interactions of everyday life and as it creates and
reflects the social realities of that life.
The
news media are those constituents of the mass media that focus on delivering
news to the general public or a target public. These include print media
(newspapers, newsmagazines), broadcast news (radio and television), and more
recently the Internet (online newspapers, news blogs, etc.). Newspapers and
periodicals often contain features written by journalists, many of whom
specialize in this form of in-depth journalism.
Feature
articles usually are longer than straight news articles, and are combined with
photographs, drawings or other "art." They may also be highlighted by
typographic effects or colors.
Writing
features can be more demanding than writing straight news stories, because
while a journalist must apply the same amount of effort to accurately gather
and report the facts of the story, the reporter must also find a creative and interesting
way to write the article, especially the lead, or the first one or two
paragraphs of the story. The lead must grab the reader's attention yet
accurately embody the ideas of the article. Often the lead of a feature article
is dictated by its subject matter. Journalists must work even harder to avoid
clichéd images and words when writing the lead and the rest of the
article.
In
Ukrainian the main sociolinguistic problem connected with media and, in
particular, with special magazines and newspapers for children, is associated
with the existence of the so called surzhyk, the phenomenon of blending of two
languages: Ukrainian and Russian. It has become the linguistic problem in
Ukraine. It was formed historically and is used during the informal communication,
but now it has become the inordinate language without any system which ruins
the Ukrainian language. The following barbarisms of the Russian origin being of
different levels were found in the periodicals: lexical (ад, бабочка, бутилка, брезгувати, видворити, внушити); phonetic (карніз, блєф, магазин); morphological (бабушка, замітити, гардеробщиця, украшати, доломаний); grammatical (не дай Бог, перепись, подпись, вечером,
по місцям); calquing like міроприємство etc. When translating into English, the named barbarisms
are substituted with literary lexicon.
The
next problem that the translator faces is the use of clichéd and slang
expressions. Unlike English media, Ukrainian newspaper style is more formal and
thus it tends not to use slang and jargon, so the task of the translator is to
make the essence of news article more formal and official (пройдисвіт, політичний авантюрист – carpetbagger; «вламувати» (переконувати) – jawboning; махінатор, спритник, проноза – wheeler-dealer). The modern tendency of
Ukrainian publicistic style is to use a lot of neologisms. This peculiarity is
explained by the fact that newspapers are the first to reflect the changes in
language and society. Neologisms are commonly translated by finding the
descriptive equivalent or by means of transliteration (staycation (compound from the verb “to stay” and the noun “vacation”) – «святкові дні або відпустка, проведені вдома
через відсутність грошей на подорож», recessionista (“recession” and “fashionista”) – «людина чий одяг відповідає важкій
економічній ситуації» etc.).
Nowadays
Internet media is the most controversial and the most interesting topic to
investigate. Due to the boom in mobile and computer technologies the news media
is turning to the so called social media. Now people don’t search for news
anymore, but news finds its consumers through social media (twitter, blogs, rss,
social sites etc.). People gain information, education, news etc. by electronic
media and print media. Social media are distinct from industrial or traditional
media, such as newspapers, television, and film. They are relatively
inexpensive and accessible to enable anyone (even private individuals) to
publish or access information, compared to industrial media, which generally
require significant resources to publish information. More than 150 newspapers
and magazines in the USA have created their accounts on Twitter. The so called
'net generation' is popularly assumed to be naturally media literate and to be
necessarily reinventing conventional linguistic and communicative practices.
Serving the sociolinguistic 'maxims' of (a) brevity and speed, (b) paralinguistic
restitution and (c) phonological approximation, the messages leaved in social
media are both linguistically unremarkable and communicatively adept. Generally
they are characterized by the absence of epithets, metaphors, the information
is very compressed, it usually includes the link to the news article where the
recipient can read the full standard article about the news he or she is
interested in. The message should be creative in order to grasp people’s
attention and make them retweet or repost the news. Now people spread the news
themselves if it is really interesting. Social media are also called user
generated content i.e. the content including news, articles etc. is generated
by Internet users.
Social
media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr are “technologies
of the self” where people do things with words in a very literal sense.
Constructing a digital self via video, images and still most prominently
language and negotiating it in exchanges with other users are central
activities in social media formats. While facework could previously be
classified unambiguously in terms of linguistic and non-linguistic actions, the
digitally constructed self also “acts” via language when symbolically engaging
in interpersonal activities such as liking, poking, friending, following,
banning and muting. There are many neologisms appearing day by day through
social media. This topic is the most up-to-date and interesting to investigate,
because there are few works dedicated to this topic.
The
task of the translator when dealing with social media is to reflect the idea
and the mood of the author, to make other people interested in what is written
about. The translation may be needed when translating the newspaper’s blogs and
sites. The translator should be creative and it is a big pile of work to make
the target text with the same intention as the source one. The translator
should be interested in what he or she is dealing with. It is advisable for the
translator to know the main technologies used in social media. In this way the
translation will be successful.
Literature used:
1.
Моисеев В.А.
Журналистика и журналисты. – К.: Дакор, 2002. – 400 с.
2.
Новое
в лингвистике. Вып. 7. Социолингвистика / Отв. ред. Н.С.Чемоданов. – М.: Прогресс, 2006. – 486 c.
3.
Стилистика газетных
жанров. – М.: Наука, 1981.
4.
Швейцер А.Д. Современная социолингвистика: теория,
проблемы, методы. – М.:
Наука, 1976. – 176 с.
5.
Labov William. The reflection of social processes in linguistic
structures. In “Readings in the Sociology
of Language”. – Paris, 1966.
6.
http://www.slideshare.net/chrissalzberg/social-media-and-translation-bridging-the-two-solitudes
7. http://collective-thoughts.com/2010/04/12/social-media-language-translation/
9. http://en-us.lionbridge.com/Translation.aspx?pageid=1376&LangType=1033