The culture-specific nature of headlines in Finansies & Tegniek and Finance Week

Abstract

Finansies & Tegniek and Finance Week, two South African financial magazines, offer the ideal research opportunity for a comparative study of English and Afrikaans texts. The fact that the magazines can be read internationally lends an interesting dimension to the strategy of the editors when the articles realise in one of the other official languages in South Africa. The hypothesis is that the Afrikaans headings are more culture-specific, local and specific in nature, whereas the English headings are more global and general. The concepts ‘globalising' and ‘localising' and the function of these concepts with reference to the process of translation, as described by Paskal (2005), are used as the instrument for describing the headings in the financial magazine articles. This paper demonstrates that the headings of the English magazine articles present global and general characteristics; while the Afrikaans headings are cultural-specific, with prominent local characteristics.

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2008, 26(4): 513–523