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From Adaptation to Appropriation: Framing the World Through News Translation

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Abstract

Terminological issues are problematic in the analysis of translation processes in news production. In the 1980s, Stetting coined the term “transediting”, which has been widely used in the translation studies literature, but “translation” itself becomes contentious in communication studies, a discipline closely related to news translation research. Only a few communication scholars have specifically dealt with the linguistic and cultural transformations of source texts, but they tend to regard translation as word-for-word transfer, unusual news production. More productive for the study of news translation seems to be the application of the concept of framing, widely used in communication studies. Framing considers the linguistic and paralinguistic elements of news texts in the promotion of certain organizing ideas that the target audience can identify with. In news translation, this entails the adaptation of a text for the target readership, a process can lead to appropriation of source material. Two examples are mentioned to illustrate this point: the appropriation of the US Department of State cables by the Wikileak organisation, and the pro-Romanian slogans produced by the Gandul newspaper as a response to Britain’s anti-immigration campaigns. The final section relates news adaptation to adaptation of other text types, such as literary and historical works.
LINGUACULTURE 1, 2014
FROM ADAPTATION TO APPROPRIATION: FRAMING
THE WORLD THROUGH NEWS TRANSLATION
ROBERTO A. VALDEÓN
Universidad de Oviedo and University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Abstract
Terminological issues are problematic in the analysis of translation processes in news
production. In the 1980s, Stetting coined the term “transediting”, which has been widely
used in the translation studies literature, but “translation” itself becomes contentious in
communication studies, a discipline closely related to news translation research. Only a
few communication scholars have specifically dealt with the linguistic and cultural
transformations of source texts, but they tend to regard translation as word-for-word
transfer, unusual news production. More productive for the study of news translation
seems to be the application of the concept of framing, widely used in communication
studies. Framing considers the linguistic and paralinguistic elements of news texts in the
promotion of certain organizing ideas that the target audience can identify with. In news
translation, this entails the adaptation of a text for the target readership, a process can
lead to appropriation of source material. Two examples are mentioned to illustrate this
point: the appropriation of the US Department of State cables by the Wikileak
organisation, and the pro-Romanian slogans produced by the Gandul newspaper as a
response to Britain’s anti-immigration campaigns. The final section relates news
adaptation to adaptation of other text types, such as literary and historical works.
Keywords: adaptation, transediting, appropriation, framing, news translation
In the 21st century news translation has attracted the attention of an important
number of translation scholars, who have published extensively on the
interlinguistic transformation processes present in news production (Bielsa and
Bassnett, Hernández Guerrero, Valdeón). However, there is no agreement on the
term to be applied to these processes, as they may involve translation but also
editing. In fact, in 1989 Stetting coined the term “transediting” to refer to the
changes that occurred when news producers receive texts in a given language
and transform them for a target readership, often using material from different
sources. In her view, transediting involves various types of adaptations:
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Adaptation to a standard of efficiency in expression:
“cleaning-up transediting”;
Adaptation to the intended function of the translated text
in its new social context: “situational transediting”;
Adaptation to the needs and conventions of the target
culture: “cultural transediting” (377).
Although Stetting applied the term to a number of different text genres,
including religious, literary and historical texts (374), transediting would later
become popular in news translation research, even though Stetting is an anglicist
rather than a translation scholar, and she was particularly concerned with
English language teaching at the time she introduced the term (Schäffner 866-
83). However, Stetting’s article has contributed to reveal the complex
relationship between news production and translation. Additionally, it reminds
us of the terminological and conceptual difficulties researchers are confronted
with when dealing with the linguistic and cultural transformation of media texts
in general, and news texts in particular. In this article, we aim to consider the
terminological conundrum characterizing news translation research. Then we
will move on to reflect on the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to
advance in this exciting subfield, focusing on the concept of framing, and will
discuss some examples to illustrate the significance of such an approach.
From translation to adaptation and back
The lack of consensus in the study of news translation is not unique to this sub-
discipline. Writing about theatre and film adaptation, Zatlin, a professor of
Spanish literature and a translator of Spanish and French theatre, has noted the
striking similarities between translation and adaptation theories (xi). “Thus,” she
claims, “I have routinely mentioned the parallels with translation when teaching
film adaptation and with film adaptation when teaching literary translation. I am,
of course, not alone in observing this connection” (x). Zatlin also observes that
translators of foreign drama usually prefer translation to adaptation (24) and
mentions John Clifford, who openly opposes the term adaptation (25). In this
context, translation tends to refer to faithful or literal renderings of a source text,
whereas adaptations “even ones that involve few textual changes, may radically
alter underlying meaning” (80). In fact, adaptation has been used by postcolonial
theorists to emphasize the appropriation of western texts in postcolonial contexts
(81), as shown by Chaudhury and Sengupta in their discussion of the Bengali
versions of Macbeth (6-18), and by Wong in her discussion of Chinese
adaptations of The Merchant of Venice (99-111).
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Adaptation has also been closely discussed in connection with filmic
versions of plays and novels. Research by authors like Naremore, Boozer and
Leitch (published by prestigious university presses) have demonstrated the
popularity of adaptation theories within academia. Boozer, for instance, relies on
structuralism and semiotics to relegate the role of the original author to a
secondary position (20-21), whereas Leitch insists on the existence of a
subliminal negotiation between the authors of original texts and screen adapters
(236-256). Here adaptation is “less an attempted resuscitation of an originary
word than a turn in an ongoing dialogical process” (64). This is related to the
work of Quebecois intellectual Michel Garneau, who, in the 1970s and 1980s,
adapted Shakespeare’s plays to the idiom of Canadian French in order to make a
statement against the dominance of the French used in France (Raw 106) and
coined the term “tradaptation.”
“Tradaptation” or transadaptation takes us back to Stetting’s transediting,
where translation went beyond word-for-word replacements and suggested more
fundamental transformations. In fact, adaptation was discussed even in the more
linguistic approaches to translation (Vandal-Sirois and Bastin 22). Vinay and
Darbelnet, for instance, stressed that it was necessary to adapt the source text if
the translator wanted to produce a good version, and they included adaptation as
a valuable procedure. The importance of translation as adaptation has only
increased in the globalized world of the late 20th and early 21
st centuries, as
organisations release information to an international audience (Vandal-Sirois
and Bastin 22). Additionally, in news production the process remains far more
invisible than in the case of canonical texts. News consumers are rarely aware of
any translation processes, let alone of any ideological shifts aimed at infusing the
target versions with new meaning. If, as Cherrington claims, “most translations
and adaptations are carried out by non-professionals; those who visit, or live,
work, or study in another country or another culture” (Cherrington 210), in news
writing translation becomes invisible as it is often regarded as a small part of the
production process. That is, translation does not exist as a relevant activity. And,
even though journalists often translate, they reject their role as translators of
news originally written in other languages. Journalists view this process as part
of an editing process, or, to put it differently, of the adaptation of the source
news texts and/or events to the expectations of the target audience.
Thus, like in the case of more canonical text types, the complexity of
news translation should encourage researchers to consider other disciplines and
epistemological approaches. As film adaptation theory can engage with literary
text analysis, communication studies can provide tools to understand the news
transediting process. However, in a first approach to communication studies we
are likely to be baffled by the conceptual challenge posed by terms like
translation and adaptation. A cursory look at some of the most recent work on
news production published by communication scholars only serves to increase
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the conceptual and terminological confusion. Let us consider the following
extract:
Framing news in terms of its economic consequences for the audience is a
translation of the journalistic news values proximity (De Vreese 190).
As can be seen, communication scholars use the term translation, albeit with
different implications. Translation tends to have a more generic use, it is akin to
transformations of any kind. Occasionally it may also refer to linguistic changes
into a target language. In 2011, Baumann, Gillespie and Sreberny guest-edited a
special issue of Journalism devoted to translation and the BBC. It is probably
the first time that communication scholars have delved into translation as a
process characteristic of news translation: here translation is understood as
linguistic transfer from a source language into a target language. In the
introduction to this special issue, they argue that “The long-standing reputation
of the BBC World Service (BBCWS) among the world’s pre-eminent
broadcasters and its credibility have depended on the largely undocumented and
unexplored everyday transcultural encounters and translation practices that have
taken place in the diasporic and cosmopolitan contact zones of Bush House”
(135). For their analysis of textual transformation practices, these authors devise
a framework that consists of four distinct processes:
By (1) transporting, we mean all processes involved in feeding information into
the BBC World Service’s [former headquarters][…] at Bush House, London,
and/or its regional desks and hubs around the globe, a unique and unequalled
infrastructure of global news coordination […]
By (2) translating, we mean the techniques, crafts, and possibly grafts, of
language-to-language transformations. Even the seemingly simplest linguistic
transformations are evidently transformative in journalistic practice, be it by
contents or by the discursive tone implied or smuggled in. Examples abound in all
our contributions.
By (3), transposing and trans-editing, we refer to implicit, and often silent,
discursive re-intonations, while trans-editing emphasizes the simultaneity of
translating and editing processes. The two, however, belong together, and go
hand-in-glove at most instances that we could research in detail.
Finally, processes of (4) transmitting were examined for converging or
conflicting patterns which often determine which audiences and users get which
news and BBC commentaries in which areas and at which, accessible or
inappropriate, times (137).
It is indeed a commendable attempt to provide a working framework for
the analysis of news production, including translation, for a discipline that, as
they point out, has largely neglected transcultural and translinguistic encounters.
However, it is a taxonomy that brings us back to the traditional view of
translation as linguistic transfer, as they reserve the term for “seemingly simplest
linguistic transformations”, whereas they borrow Stetting’s transediting for more
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complex practices where translation is modulated by editing processes. Thus,
Baumann, Gillespie and Sreberny are clearly unaware of the evolution of
translation studies publications, which have largely moved away from earlier
definitions of translation in terms of its faithfulness to an original text. However,
by adding editing and transposing to the equation, with its many re-intonations,
they also hint at adaptation as a key element in the interplay between linguistic
transfer and news writing.
On the other hand, translation and adaptation are key terms in van
Leeuwen’s enlightening discussion of the rewriting characteristic of The
Vietnam News, an English language daily funded by the Vietnamese government
as a part of its market reform policies. Van Leeuwen analyses 100 translations
from the Vietnamese press authored by forty translators who also acted as
proofreaders (and, on the other hand, wrote their own articles too. This is a
common situation within the trade, as journalists may start as translators and
gradually work on their own stories). In the study, van Leeuwen claims that
translators worked with six to eight sub-editors who corrected the translated
English and wrote headlines and captions. This is a typical feature of news
writing, as headlines are often authored by other journalists. Within this context,
van Leeuwen identified three types of decisions: translation decisions affecting
the language; translation/adaptation decisions affecting journalistic style (226-
230); and translation/adaptation decisions affecting cultural and ideological
references in the source texts (230-234). The title of the article is also highly
indicative of the content: “Translation, adaptation, globalisation,” where
translation is applied to linguistic choices whereas adaptation is related to the
modulations (or re-intonations in Baumann, Gillespie and Sreberny’s terms)
necessary to cater for an international audience with a strong Anglo-Australian
bias.
The Anglo-Australian features of the target text are explained in terms of
the globalizing strategy of the Vietnamese government and the attempt to reach
an international readership. In order to do this, translators and editors imitate the
practices of their Western counterparts and avoid the peculiarities of the local
models. In this sense, the resulting texts are very much target-oriented (van
Leeuwen 235). This is achieved by means of adaptations strategies.
Paradoxically, while the adaptation of plays mentioned above localizes the
product for regional audiences, the adaptation of Vietnamese news globalizes the
text for a wider Anglo-Australian readership that cuts across nations and
continents.
Framing the news through translation
By translating/adapting Vietnamese news for international audiences, the editors
of this news medium contribute to create news texts that meet the expectations
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of the target readers in terms of format, and, above all, content. In
communication research the concept of framing has provided a fruitful basis for
the study of news content. However, framing is not free from controversy. In
fact, during the 20th and 21st centuries it has been used in several disciplines:
from psychology to linguistics, from sociology to communication. Its long
tradition in academia has given way to a “fractured paradigm” (Entman 51).
From a sociological perspective, frames have been defined as “principles of
organisation which govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective
involvement in them” (Goffman 10), and as a “central organizing idea” that
contributes to make sense of relevant events (Gamson and Modigliani 3).
Similar definitions have been used in communication studies where Reese refers
to “organizing principles that are socially shared and persistent over time, that
work symbolically to meaningfully structure the social world” (Reese 150).
Framing can be realized by means of various strategies, including
selection and deselection of information, as well as careful use of the various
components of news texts, including headlines and subheads, leads and the
selection of quotes. Equally relevant is the use of graphs and photographs
(Tankard 100). To these, translation can contribute to the framing processes of
news production by combining selection and deselection of news events and
reports, as well as linguistic transfer and adaptation of other elements such as
headlines and quotes. As a matter of fact, headlines are the most likely
components of a source text to change, as conventions vary from language to
language. However, they are not necessarily the most relevant. We can use the
case of the so-called Wikileaks as a case in point. Although the term Wikileaks
refers to an online journalistic organisation that posts classified documents
considered of public interest by its promoters, the word has been widely used in
connection with the release of the US Department of State wires in five major
international media, the New York Times, UK’s The Guardian, Spain’s El País,
France’s Le Monde and Germany’s Der Spiegel.
The publication of the wires involved a careful selection of texts by those
companies, as some of the material was considered inappropriate. Another factor
taken into account was the large number of cables, which made it impracticable
for the newspapers to publish them all or post them in their online versions. It
also meant that translation acted as a gatekeeping mechanism and as an
adaptation strategy, which allowed the media to select what to publish, when and
how. In the end globalisation and localisation acted as two complementary
forces (Castells 84), and translation contributed to adapt the bulk of the original
texts to the target readerships: on the one hand, the combined economic and
political power of these five media turned the Wikileaks into a global issue, but,
on the other, their own local interests limited the scope of possible themes to be
published. For instance, the online version of El País made a world map
available to its readers with a specific number of wires for each country. The
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number one country is, of course, the United States with 600, with Spain coming
second with a total of 292 texts (“Las Revelaciones de Wikileaks). The
numbers of papers with information about other countries is usually well below
ten, with the notable exceptions of Cuba and Venezuela in Latin America, and
Iran in the Middle East. The number of papers about China is also high,
highlighting the interest of the US in the Asian giant. However, it should be
noted that many of the cables are available only in English, whereas a smaller
number of them has been adapted into news articles.
On the other hand, The Guardian also offers its international readers a
virtual map of the cables that can be accessed by clicking on the appropriate
link. As can be expected, the number of cables is much larger for the Unites
States, with a total of 232 wires, and the UK, with 72 texts in total (“US
Embassy Cables”). The map also provides easy links to articles based on the
leaked texts, 48 and 29 respectively. Adaptation here is not available in terms of
interlinguistic translation but rather in the number of news articles available
based on the original material, as well as on the selection and deselection
processes of the original texts. In other words, we are dealing with intralinguistic
translation and/or adaptation processes. Thus, adaptation plays a key role in the
writing and publication of the original papers in English. However, it is the
efforts of the five media at play that makes the Wikileaks issue so unique: the
combined use of appropriation, adaptation and translation turn the release of the
papers into a global venture. Additionally, these processes have expanded as the
texts reach other markets and cultures, which, in turn, needed to adapt and
translate them for their own target audiences.
In other cases, though, adaptation plays a subtler role, especially when the
abuse of national stereotypes becomes a contentious issue for certain media and
nations. The current economic crisis, for instance, has promoted a rhetoric of
exclusion and fear that is present in European media as well as in the voices of
many politicians. In 2013, following the announcement of the lifting of all
restrictions of movement within the European Union, allowing the citizens of
Bulgaria and Romania to move to other EU nations in search of jobs, the tabloid
press in the UK abuse the image of Eastern Europeans as pickpockets and
scroungers in an attempt to encourage the British government to oppose the
measure. The institutionalized response came soon afterwards in what was a
controversial abuse of stereotypes of the self, in this case the UK: the
government announced that it would use the image of Britain as an
unwelcoming and rainy nation. The less conservative media criticized the
announcement and even called their readers to send slogans to dissuade
foreigners from visiting the country. The readers of The Guardian came up with
ideas such as
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The sky in the UK is this colour [grey] for 8 months of the year. Try Miami
instead […]
UK? YUK!
Come Here and Clean the Loo (“US Embassy Cables”)
The controversy reached Bulgaria and Romania, where the media published the
information conveniently translated into their languages. In an unexpected turn
of events, Gandul, one of the major newspapers in Romania adapted the idea to
promote a pro-Romanian campaign, in which the writers used similar lines but
with a very different aim: to attract UK citizens to the country.
Bunicul meu e vecin cu printul Charles, al tau este?
[My grandfather is Prince Charles’s neighbour, what about yours?]
Noi il avem pe Dracula voi pe David Cameron!
[We have Dracula, you have David Cameron!]22
In this case, Romanian media appropriated a frame of exclusion, selected the
information that wanted to publish and produced new poignant slogans
parodying the original discourse.
The Wikileaks and the Gandul slogans exemplify the forms in which
adaptation and translation work together in the age of globalisation. Orengo has
pointed out that localisation in news production involves a process of adaptation
of a text so that it “has the feel and look of a nationally-manufactured piece of
news” (170). However, the examples mentioned above do not only have the feel
and look of a local product: they do not hide their international origin, but rather
they preserve it by adapting the material to meet the expectations of the target
readership in the case of the Wikileaks, or by appropriating a news event (the
anti-Romanian campaign jokingly turned anti-British by The Guardian) and a
textual typology (advertising slogans) in order to create a new and more positive
stereotype, as in the case of the Gandul campaign. In this sense, the producers of
these texts are not just translating, they are not merely adapting the source
documents; they are appropriating the texts in order to manufacture ways of
looking at the Other that the readers can identify and even feel more comfortable
with. Leo Chan argues that “adaptations are like domesticated translations,
where target values, conventions and norms are superimposed on the source text
(…) and the foreign becomes palatable for the local audience” (415), but in these
cases the foreign becomes more palatable by preserving its origin.
22 I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Rodica Dimitriu for translating these into
English.
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Final discussion
Writing about literary and historical texts, Vandal-Sirois and Bastin have noted
that adaptation and appropriation usually go hand in hand. Adaptation has been a
very problematic concept within translation studies, as the more purists tend to
regard it as an extreme form of free translation. Historic texts usually provide
good examples not only of adaptation, which Sanders defines as a journey form
the source text to a new cultural milieu, but of appropriation, understood as “a
more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new
cultural product and domain” (26). Sanders, who focuses on literary works,
stresses the difficulties of distinguishing between homage and plagiarism (32-
41), but pays little attention to translation (Chan 415). However, the connection
between translation, adaptation and appropriation emerges as we become aware
of two facts, regardless of whether we are looking at literature, history or news.
First, the adapted works take on new “meanings, applications and resonance”
and, two, “appropriation does not always make its founding relationships and
interrelationships as clear” (Sanders 32). Vandal-Sirois and Bastin relate this to
Chesterman’s telos, the personal goal of the translator (Vandal-Sirois and Bastin
23). We can take this further and extend it to the ideological stance of the target
readership. The Spanish chronicles of the conquest and their translations into
English provide us with excellent examples of the adaptation and, eventually,
appropriation of source texts to support personal and national agendas (Valdeón,
“Retranslation”). Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción
de las Indias offers itself as an example of the appropriation of a text that was
meant to convince the future Spanish king to take action against the
misdemeanors of the conquerors with a careful combination of facts and fiction.
The English translators of the 16th century and beyond not only appropriated the
text for their purposes, they also increased the fictional elements of the book and
claimed that these fictional elements were as truthful as possible (Foster 121).
Understood this way, journalistic texts mentioned above provide an
excellent opportunity to study these complex interrelationships. For example, the
Gaceta de Caracas, a pro-independence periodical in the nineteenth century
Venezuela, used English, French and Spanish source texts in order to produce
articles that would support the ideological positions of the target journalists and
their readers: “All are deliberate interventions motivated by the target journalists
and their readers, and even though sources are often quoted, they still represent
appropriations” (Vandal-Sirois and Bastin 37). Two centuries later news
appropriation and adaptation still characterizes news production, although in
most cases the invisibility of the process does not allow the readers the work of
the journalist as a translator. The US Department of State cables made available
by Wikileaks and five Western media offer an example of appropriation of texts,
their adaptation to the needs and interests of the target audience and the selective
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translation and adaptation of some of them. Here readers are more likely to
become aware of the fact that the target texts are instances of appropriation,
translation and adaptation.
However, in the majority of the cases this relationship becomes far more
shadowy, and the influence upon the audience is less obvious and, yet,
unescapable. This implies that research into how these transformations are
shaped, by whom and why would help us take a more critical view of how
information is fed onto us in the age of globalisation, as a small minority of the
population now controls mainstream media, and news has become another
component of the consumerist society (Castells 118). In this sense, a term like
transediting may have become obsolete or even useless (Schäffner 881) because
the original emphasis on language transfer and edition is of lesser importance
than the political, economic and social implications of processes like adaptation
and appropriation. For this reason, the analysis of news texts requires an
interdisciplinary approach that takes advantage of the research carried out in
disciplines such as communication studies, where concepts like framing have
contributed to advance our knowledge of news production practices and
agendas. Thus, it might be necessary to consider whether concepts like
localisation and globalisation are enough. Adaptation studies has suggested the
term relocation to refer to the recontextualisation of a source text (Sanders 63-
64), although in a more positive way that we would like to suggest here.
Finally, it should be pointed out that, even though transediting may not
be the right term to define the strategies characteristic of news translation, it
seems reasonable to differentiate between translation and other practices. While
this does not imply that we should return to translation as a more or less faithful
linguistic transfer between languages, it might valuable to make a distinction
between translation and other processes such as adaptation and a more violent
and disruptive one: appropriation.
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62 ROBERTO A VALDEÓN
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... Instead of using manipulation at the micro-textual level, these agencies would rather resort to the ideological strategy of selective appropriation (cf. Valdeón, 2008Valdeón, , 2014Baker, 2010), that is, choosing to translate only the texts that serve their ideological viewpoints. Therefore, the present study argues that for a more valid analysis of the manipulative potential of explicitation, we not only need to check whether explicitations alter the original perspective, but also see if the selection of what gets explicitated contributes to the construction of a particular image of a group of people and serves certain ideological goals. ...
... According to Hernández Guerrero's most recent account of media translation strategies (2022, pp. 233-237), which draws on many important previous accounts (e.g., Fujii, 1988;Bielsa and Bassnett, 2009;Valdeón, 2014), explicitation is considered as one of the message supplementing tools and gatekeeping operations (filtering the translated content before dissemination) that can be used to create a functionally adequate translation for a given use. Explicitation is also one of transediting strategies, the strategies that are used by both translators and editors to adapt the translated media content to the intended function of the translation and the conventions of the target language and culture. ...
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This article describes some of the socio-political (ideological) factors affecting the use of explicitation. It explores how explicitations are utilized by a media organisation whose translations continue to construct a negative public image of a particular community. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and descriptive and functional models to translation studies, a corpus consisting of 26,000 words from Arabic-English translated news articles published by MEMRI was analyzed. The results reveal a strong tendency in explicitations to maintain the ideological perspective of the original at the micro-textual level, while promoting a religious and cultural Other at the macro-level. Instead of compromising its credibility by using misleading or inaccurate explicitations, MEMRI uses apparently accurate and faithful explicitations in translations strategically selected to accentuate an intended negative image. This casts light on the paradoxical function of explicitation in media translation: while it is assumed to reduce ambiguities and improve cultural understanding at the textual level, it may promote misunderstanding and cultural prejudice at a larger discourse level.
... Over the past twenty years, translation studies researchers have borrowed concepts from other disciplines to study the relationship between journalistic translation and news production, including Mona Baker's adaptation of Somers and Gibson's narrative theory (Baker, 2006); the notion of "gatekeeping", a concept widely used in journalism studies to refer to the various gates that information needs to pass through before it is finally published (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009), which Pan (2014) has used in her analysis of Cankao Xiaoxi (or Reference News) and Valdeón (2022a) in his study of El País's coverage of the Catalan separatist crisis; and 'framing', an element of narrative theory also used by other authors (Luo, 2014;Valdeón, 2014). This partly responds to the calls for interdisciplinarity voiced by translation scholars that consider cross-fertilization with other fields an asset rather than a problem (see, for example, the chapters in Gambier & van Doorslaer, 2016; and the discussion by Bassnett & Johnston, 2019). ...
Article
Drawing on the concepts of agenda-setting and framing, this article aims to examine the role played by translation in the selection of articles of the New York Times for the Spanish and Chinese versions. It analyses whether the three versions focus on similar topics and therefore follow a similar agenda, identifies the topics that receive more salience via translation, and how these are complemented with texts specifically written for the translated/foreign language versions, as well as the framing mechanisms used by the writers and/or translators to create, suppress or accentuate ideological positionings. For that purpose, a constructed week methodology was used in order to collect a total of seventy articles per language. The analysis, based on Baker's adaptation of narrative theory and Kress and van Leeuwen's study of non-verbal signs, shows that the three versions of the New York Times vary in terms of format and content. Thus, while the English and Chinese versions focus on political and economic issues, the Spanish version undergoes a process of tabloidization.
... Therefore, this framework applied to the analysis of Russian Energy Week in the context of German-language newspapers. Also, the theoretical background is based on the papers by Roberto A. Valdeón [9], Christina Schäffner [8], Kyle Conway [4] and Alberto Orengo [7] devoted to translation in journalism. ...
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Between 13 th and 15 th October 2021, President Putin held a conference known as the "Russian Energy Week 2021" to examine the impact of energy exportation. The news diffused through various media, aided by translation and narration aspects of journalism. The study primarily relies on qualitative research to identify foreign news articles to investigate journalistic translation. The aim is to assess how the original meaning of the source text (ST) is manipulated through translation in the media. The research examines the impact translation has on the original utterances and translated phrases. The research utilizes Critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology to facilitate contextual analyses from the text. The research verified the intertextual relation between ST and target text (TT) sentences; it found ST utterances the translational quotations from the newspaper articles are based on. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time the discursive strategy of the German-language print media during the journalistic translation of top Russian officials' speeches is investigated. The results confirm translation as a source mild to severe alterations with some words omitted whereas other implying different meanings as perceived from the original. Also, the results show that journalists use translation of original statements to construct their arguments. Moreover, the discursive strategy of the original speaker is subject to change, often significant.
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Indonesia dianggap sebagai salah satu negara dengan penanganan wabah COVID-19 terburuk pada periode awal pandemi. Sebagai kantor berita nasional, Antaranews.com banyak menerbitkan berita nasional terkait COVID-19 dan mengunggah terjemahan bahasa Inggrisnya. Penerjemahan jurnalistik tidak hanya mengalihbahasakan namun juga menimbang respon pembaca terhadap pilihan kata terjemahan. Penelitian ini bertujuan menunjukkan kata kunci dan pola kolokasi leksikal bahasa Indonesia dan bahasa Inggris yang muncul dalam berita terkait COVID-19. Sebanyak 30 pasangan berita terkait COVID-19 dikumpulkan dari laman Antaranews.com dalam periode Mei – Agustus 2021 dan dianalisis menggunakan peranti lunak AntConc. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan kecenderungan kesepadanan kata kunci yang muncul di kedua korpus sehingga dapat dianggap memilki makna dan tema yang kurang lebih sama. Perbedaan terlihat pada variasi pola kolokasi leksikal yakni bahasa Indonesia memiliki tiga (3) pola kolokasi yang dominan sedangkan bahasa Inggris memiliki dua (2) pola. Perbedaan lain adalah dalam korpus bahasa Inggris kata government dan program kerap muncul sehingga pembaca berita terjemahan lebih terpapar oleh gambaran positif kegiatan dan program pemerintah Indonesia dalam menanggulangi wabah COVID-19.
Chapter
This chapter argues that specific parts of journalistic transediting require transcreation strategies in order to appeal to local readers as consumers of foreign news. In line with the literature on transcreation, we argue that three distinctive features justify a transcreation approach to interlingual transfer of news, which may be distinguished from translation practice as a broader domain and which feature in a strategy of news translation as acculturation. These features are (i) an enhanced level of creativity, (ii) linguistic productivity in generating new constructions or words, and (iii) fully rewritten text, including selecting new, local content. Drawing on data from the translation classroom, these features are identified in students’ translations from English into Dutch of three articles on the subjects of Scottish devolution, Muslim attacks in Europe, and medicine. They focus on the following challenges in the source texts: (i) culture-specific metaphors, (ii) multi-word ad hoc word formations or neologisms and, in perhaps the clearest instance of journalistic transcreation, (iii) newspaper headlines. The general findings for the three cases indicate that only a minority of the students opted for creative and truly localised target text solutions. We believe that this can be addressed in didactic terms by scaffolding from translation to specific transcreation strategies.
Article
p>It is common for a target text in a news translation to have a different format from the source text. These changes allow translators to frame the article to affect the perception of target readers. This paper aims to analyse framing strategy in news translation texts from Indonesian to English by using reports about the Kanjuruhan Stadium Disaster as the sample. The analysis continues to identify which issues are emphasised or understated in the translated articles through framing. This research will use the framing strategy from Mona Baker in news translation texts as the framework to examine the news reports. Previous studies discovered Baker's technique emphasises specific cultural values and understates the opposing. However, this paper concludes that the framing strategy in translating news texts serves an additional purpose. It is to refine the image of the Indonesian government after the tragic event in the eyes of the target readers. Moreover, this research also finds that the selective appropriation strategy is the most commonly used approach for these texts.</p
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Haber çevirisi üzerinde yapılan çalışmalar çeviribilim alanında son zamanlarda daha sık yer almaya başlamıştır. Bu bağlamda çokdilli haber medyaları tarafından farklı kültürlere sahip okur kitlelerine sunulan haberler araştırma konusu olarak büyük önem arz etmektedir. Makalemizde haber çevirisi konusu Roberto A. Valdeon’un (2009) bilgilendirici metinler için kullandığı “bilgi çevirisi” tanımından yola çıkılarak ele alınacaktır. Bu bağlamda Euronews haber medyasında Fransızca ve Türkçe dillerinde yayınlanmış göç konulu haberler, Christiane Nord’un “Dört İşlev Modeli” çerçevesinde incelenecektir. Bu yöntemle haber çevirisi örnekleri iki aşamalı bir analize tabi tutulacaktır. Öncelikle, metnin işlevini belirlemek amacıyla Fransızca ve Türkçe haber başlıkları sözlüksel ve anlamsal açısından incelenecektir. Ardından haber metninin bağlamından yola çıkarak ilk aşamada belirlenmiş olan işlevin yerine getirilmesini sağlayan destekleyici öğeler metin içinden seçilerek irdelenecektir. Makalemizin sonucunda aynı haberin iki farklı kültüre sunulması sürecinde meydana gelen işlevsel ve anlamsal değişikliklerin tespit edilmesi amaçlanmaktadır. Bulguların analiz edilmesi sonucunda çokdilli haber medyalarında haberlerin farklı bakış açılarıyla ve okur odaklı olarak hazırlandığının, haber metninin bir bütün oluşturduğunun, bilgi aktarımının farklı sözlüksel ve anlamsal ilişkiler kuran sözlükbirimlerinin, deyişlerin ve ifadelerin bütüncül katkısıyla gerçekleştiğinin tespit edilmesi öngörülmektedir.
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News agencies are regularly mentioned in scholarly works among the principal sources of information for legacy news organisations and titles, particularly in the 24/7 online news environment. However, little is known about how these agencies themselves source news. To fill this gap in scholarship, we present a case study of how Belgium’s national, multilingual news agency sources its science news. We first position our study within a conceptual framework combining insights from news diversity and translation studies research. Next, we operationalise a triangulation of a content analysis, a survey, and interviews with newsroom staff to shed light on the practices and policies that shape and constrain the inner workings of a national news agency in a small, multilingual media market. Our findings reveal a large, potentially worrying, dependency on information subsidies and their assumed factuality from press releases and other news agencies, largely sourced locally. We contextualise our findings within wider news agency and science journalism research.
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Since the sixteenth century the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) by Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) has been translated into English several times. This article analyses the 1992 retranslation by Nigel Griffin. My working hypothesis is that contemporary translations of the text find it hard to resist the anti-Spanish narrative present in earlier translations. To this end the article will assess (1) whether Griffin's retranslation is closer to the source text than earlier versions, especially John Phillips's 1656 Tears of the Indians; (2) how and to what extent the paratexts have an impact on the potential reception of the translation; and (3) to what extent we can trace in Griffin's translation the survival of other elements used in previous editions, notably the engravings that have become closely associated with the text itself. It is found that whereas some features of the earlier translation have been toned down, the inclusion of the engravings, Griffin's footnotes and some of his translation choices continue to echo earlier versions, even though the motivations for publication (ideological or otherwise) may differ.
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Literary scholars and historians have long noted a strong tendency in all human societies to rewrite original texts, ending in the production of adaptations that are only loosely connected to their sources. In our age, however, attention has also been drawn to the way these adaptations serve as carriers of cultural subjects and formations that are transmitted through various media, verbal (literary) as well as visual (filmic). Reviewing the research of the past several decades, one might say the study of adaptation as a means whereby cultures cross national and linguistic boundaries has flourished through the work done by scholars of film adaptations, intercultural theatre and children's literature. However, for some time translation theorists have actually been exploring the theoretical underpinnings of adaptations while providing the methodological tools for close textual investigation. On the other hand, adaptations are also a key area of inquiry for researchers in intercultural studies, which focuses on the interactive relationship between elements belonging to two cultures. Adaptation is, in effect, a translational as well as intercultural mode.
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Adaptation, a complex bilingual and bicultural process, is further problematised in a colonial scenario inflected by burgeoning nationalism and imperialist counter-oppression. Nagendranath Bose’s Karnabir (1884/85), the second extant Bengali translation of Macbeth was written after the First War of Indian Independence in 1857 and its aftermath - the formation of predominantly upper and middle class nationalist organisations that spearheaded the freedom movement. To curb anti-colonial activities in the cultural sphere, the British introduced repressive measures like the Theatre Censorship Act and the Vernacular Press Act. Bengal experienced a revival of Hinduism paradoxically augmented by the nationalist ethos and the divisive tactics of British rule that fostered communalism. This article investigates the contingencies and implications of domesticating and othering Macbeth at this juncture and the collaborative/oppositional strategies of the vernacular text vis-à-vis colonial discourse. The generic problems of negotiating tragedy in a literary tradition marked by its absence are compounded by the socio-linguistic limitations of a Sanskritised adaptation. The conflicted nature of the cultural indigenisation evidenced in Karnabir is explored with special focus on the nature of generic, linguistic and religious acculturation, issues of nomenclature and epistemology, as well as the political and ideological negotiations that the target text engages in with the source text and the intended audience.
Article
In hierdie artikel word aangevoer dat 'n streng afbakening van vertaling as spieëlbeeld van die oorspronklike uitgedien is en dat die begrip vertaling uitgebrei moet word om adaptasie en herformulering in te sluit. Vertaalonderrig in Suid-Afrika in die besonder moet hierdie verandering in ag neem ten einde die vertaalprofessie in lyn te bring met veranderende sosiopolitieke strukture. Daar word verduidelik hoe Nord (1991a) se funksionele vertaalmodel as raamwerk gebruik kan word om studente te leer hoe om tekste toeganklik en aanvaarbaar vir die teikenlesers te maak.
Article
This paper reflects on the terms used in investigating news translation, with a special focus on the term transediting as it was suggested in a paper by Stetting. After a summary. of Stetting's original arguments, some research into news translation is presented, illustrating main methods, findings, and concepts used. The paper presents arguments put forward by various scholars for using or rejecting the term translation for describing the complex processes of translation in the context of mass media and illustrates which alternative terms are used. It is shown that Stetting's original aim in coining the term transediting was to raise awareness of translation being More than a pure replacement of a source text by an equivalent target text. Transformations as identified in news translation, however, are characteristic of translation more generally. Therefore, the paper finally reflects on whether there is a need to keep the term transediting and whether it has any explanatory power for describing the practices in news translation.
Book
The mass media are of paramount importance in the formulation and transmission of messages about key developments of global significance, such as terrorism and the war in Iraq, yet the key mediating role of translation in the reception of speeches and addresses of figures like Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein has remained largely invisible. Incorporating the results of extensive fieldwork in key global news organizations such as Reuters, Agence France Press and Inter Press Service, this book addresses central issues relating to the new pressures on translation arising from globalization, analyzing new texts from major news agencies as well as alternative media organizations. Co-written by Susan Bassnett, a leading figure in the field of translation studies, this book presents close readings of different English versions of key Arabic texts circulated in Western media to demonstrate the ways in which a cultural and religious 'Other' is framed in different media. © 2009 Esperança Bielsa and Susan Bassnett. All rights reserved.
Article
Due to the peculiar nature of news texts, the adoption of a theory of ‘localisation’ rather than conventional translation theories accounts more easily for both the commercial nature and the global scale of news distribution. News texts are global products which are distributed through a localisation process involving not only reception by locales of a given text, but also the simultaneous production of more versions of a same news report and the production of a new target text of which translation is only a part and not the translator-journalist's goal. Such a text is tailored for ‘sub-locales’ whose identity is political as well as linguistic. The case of the Italian press is typical, as it shows how a global news report is not only interlinguistically localised into the Italian locale, but also intralinguistically adapted to suit readers' political leanings within the same linguistic locale.