作者简介：李慧，山西师范大学政法学院马克思主义中国化研究2011研究生 摘 要：英语新闻，尤其是那些母语为英语的国家所作的报导，为了使语言短小简练，同时节省空间，它们大量使用单音节词、缩写词等，并且新的词汇层出不穷，这对我们中国人来说是难于理解的。本文以CCTV-9为例，分析英语新闻中词汇使用的特征，并得出这样的结论：社会是发展的社会，如果我们想深入社会，必须从身边的新闻入手，真正了解新闻，了解其词汇特征。
关键词：英语新闻；词汇特征；CCTV-9
CCTV-9 is the only international English Channel in our country, and it keeps 24 hours of broadcasting programs, in which news and its subject are in the most. In order to let its reports more vivid and real, the reporter tends to use various speech means. Lexicon, as the basic element in the English language, is the most active part. Applying the features of lexicon suitable and using its cultural connotation to emphasize the subject are one of the top skills used by English news reporters and editors. Therefore, sometimes we are difficult to translate the content of this news.
Television news concludes the two features of television and news. The feature of news is timeliness, and the faster, the better. If we want to improve the broadcast speed, the best way is to use small word, which can express the meaning brief and avoid the tediously long. While the features of television also have some factors, it has not only the picture, but also the commentary and screen. In order to attract people’s attention, reporters and editors should take care of some factors that the screen or the news headlines or news points all should have high generalization. What is more, the space is limited in the screen, so when the subtitle is too long, it has to move to another line, and the audience must shift to another side to see it. In order to solve the question, small words are used to replace the long and big words. For example: Member of government blasts democrats.
In the English news, new things produce the new words. News is the best channel for us to get the information from various angles of our social life, like economy, culture, technology and even all the factors. For example, “The Watergate Scandal” happened in America in 1971, so when we want to describe a scandal happened in our life, we call them “noun + gate”, like “Sexy Photo gate” and the recent “Li Gang gate”. Similarly, “My father is Li Gang” and “My daughter is Peng Shuai”, they are popular just because they can express people’s mind and be understood clearly, and the two persons is known by all the people in our times.
In the screen, there often appear some acronyms and clippings, which can make our language brief, especially in west countries, their pace of life is picking up, so they hope to get much more information in the least time. Therefore, as the headline of news, lexicon must try to be looked brief, and use the shorten word as soon as possible. Acronyms and clippings can save space when they are bold and big, they also can make people comfortable, and attract people’s attention to read them. For example: Oil kills 3 seekers in NW America. (“NW” is the acronym of “northwest”). Ellipsis is a syntactic feature of English news, which is nine in ten in some newspapers. For example: Snow forecast of Honolulu bad so omitted.
The readers of English news exist in various fields, so their cultural levels are not equal, which require reporters to use the special term to get the vivid effect, like the name of persons, the name of places and the name of things. They use the noun of certain place to replace various organizations which built in the place, for example, “the city of dragon” (龙城) refers to the “Taiyuan”; “Ice City” (冰城) replaces “Harbin”; “the oriental pearl” (东方明珠) stands for the “Shanghai”. The news is used to applying the foreign words which is an obvious feature, especially refers to foreign or the latest event. For example, Fengshui is Chinese “feng shui”; running dogs is Chinese “zou gou”; Encore is French repetition of an item. The uses of these foreign words fill up the defect of English lexicon.
With the improvement of our international position, China has been noticed by other countries. When report the Chinese problems in English news, there are many lexicons refer to our special economy, culture, politics and so on. These lexicons are hard to find a suitable expression in English, therefore, we can see some translations of these lexicons with Chinese characteristic, which have been accepted and admitted by the English countries, and only when we use these words with the Chinese features, we can express the meaning clearly. At the same time, these words have expanded the English vocabulary. For example: a better-off life; well-off family. (小康，小康家庭); Paper tiger (纸老虎); Tycoon (大款，大亨); Xanadu is Chinese “Shangrila” (世外桃源).
There are many words which only used by Chinese people appear in the news, they have Chinese characteristics and accepted by almost foreign people. Especially after 1978, China walks into our own road and develops our Chinese characteristics. With our social development, new words with Chinese characteristic appear constantly, and of course they are accepted by other countries. It states that other countries have affirmed the development of our country.
Though the paper explains these features on CCTV-9, they are the feature of all the news. Newspaper, radio newscast, television and so on, which all are the media to spread news, the connotation of news will not be changed. Therefore, if we want to understand news from its deep, we should notice these lexical features accurate.（作者单位：山西师范大学政法学院）
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