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

In our ever-more globalized world, the digital age profoundly affects mass media communication. Over the past two decades, the online publishing industry has undergone a number of changes, from technologies of production, transmission, reception and consumption to journalism skills. The Web essentially differs from print because “[...] technology is not just part of the production process but is fundamentally bound up with the content” (Thurman 2005a: 228). This inevitably has an effect on the way language is tackled by journalists in the new medium: it tends to be adapted for the screen. Similarly, digital technology has a major impact on the process of translation nowadays. Both online journalism and translation tend to come to grips with notions of ‘immediacy’, ‘transparency’ and ‘plain speaking’ (cf. Cronin 2013). This work seeks to explore the world of print and digital magazines in the domain of popular scientific discourse. In particular, it aims at investigating what happens when headlines contained in a Table of Contents undergo a process of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999) and are published online. It is argued that such a shift represents an instance of “intralingual” (Jakobson 1959) translation. Focussing on a case study centred on National Geographic magazine, in its printed and online versions, the work will offer a linguistic analysis to show how language choices differ when migrating from the page to the screen. The final goal of this study is to see whether such differences between printed and online Table of Contents 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’ and ‘transparency’ typical of the new media.