Cultural Ethos Constructed in Press Titles and Their Translation

Abstract

The present study explores, from a contrastive point of view, the conditions that rule the political discourse in terms of linguistic politeness. By contrasting the data (examples drawn from press titles, mainly the French journal Le Monde Diplomatique and its’ translations into Greek), we will be able to discover the underlying operations and constraints that regulate the use of such markers and to reach conclusions about the existence or not of symmetrical uses of our two languages. The theoretical framework followed is that of Brown and Levinson and the one of the Theory of Enunciation. In the case of press titles translation, despite the possibility of using symmetrical structures in source text as well as in target text, different structures are mostly preferred. This discrepancy leads to hypothesis about different linguistic attitudes of each linguistic community reflected explicitly by the use of different syntactic/lexical markers. It is this awareness that enabled Brown and Levinson (1987: 248) to consider cross-cultural variation and recognise that some societies may be oriented towards one or the other type of politeness (i.e. negative or positive)», formulating the so called cultural ethos of each linguistic community.