The language of popular science from the printed page to the Web: The case of the Table of Contents

Abstract

This paper offers a linguistic study within the domain of popular scientific discourse in the digital age. In particular, it is concerned with print and digital magazines and aims at investigating the process of ‘remediation’ from the printed page to the Web. More specifically, it focuses on headlines contained in the Table of Contents and argues that, when migrating from the page to the screen, they undergo a process of ‘intralingual’ translation. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the kind of shifts taking place show similarities to the linguistic-cultural changes occurring in ‘interlingual’ translation in the digital world. The theoretical background is mainly linguistic and broadly informed by translation studies, but has links to journalism, new media and digital communication. An empirical analysis of a corpus of headlines contained in National Geographic − in its print edition and online version − will be illustrated as a case in point. The final goal is to see whether language shifts could be related to (1) practical constraints of the digital medium, (2) issues of global communication and/or (3) needs to cope with the rhetoric of ‘immediacy’, ‘transparency’ and ‘plain speaking’ typical of the new media (cf. Cronin 2013)