Facts and information ‘necessarily have to be “localised” to come to terms with the national-and political sensitivities of a people while meeting market requirements of a very specific readership and its cultural and political receptivity in less than 24 hours’ (170). Orengo observes that the source language utterances that are embedded within the target news text ‘are more or less signalled through markers such as inverted commas or italics, and more or less faithful according to the newspaper’s degree of supposed bias’ (ibid.: 184). He concludes that translation today is increasingly acquiring the mere function of information to the detriment of its function of mediation and cultural exchange (Orengo 2005: 171). It is helpful at the point to clarify terms and labels and define what is meant here by the expression ‘news translation’.
3.3.2 The name and nature of news translation
In ‘Rethinking Transediting’ (2012: 866-883), Schäffner takes stock and offers some timely reflections on the concept of news translation, on the approaches adopted in researching this area, and the metalanguage within Translation Studies that has evolved in order to refer to this particular translational phenomenon. The title alludes to Stetting’s (1989) term, ‘transediting’ that was coined in order to ‘account for the fuzzy borderline between translating and editing’ (Schäffner 2012: 881) but also to justify the act of ‘improving and, to a certain extent, changing texts in the translation process’ (Stetting 1989: 373 cited in Schäffner 2012: 868). Schäffner points
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out that Stetting’s suggested conflation of translation and editing was not intended to refer exclusively to news contexts. Stetting was writing at a time when notions of linguistic equivalence still dominated translation theory, more or less in the same years in which Skopos theory (Vermeer 1989/2004) and functional approaches (Nord 1988/1997) legitimized such editing strategies as deletion, addition, reformulation, and so on, and the ‘ideological turn’ (Wing-Kuong Leung 2006: 129-143) that would have questioned them was yet to take hold. Today the application of CDA to a journalistic text in which translated information appears, as Schäffner proposes (2008, 2012 see section 3.4.2), would lead to querying the motivations behind the changes that might have been made for reasons other than readability.
However, despite its non-specific nature, the term transediting has been espoused by a number of scholars (Hursti 2001; van Doorslaer 2009; Cheesman and Nohl 2010).
Instead, Bielsa and Bassnett (2009: 64) speak of news translation to indicate the form that translation takes when it is integrated in news production within the journalistic field. Press Translation is another expression used by scholars (Bani 2006;
Kontos and Sidiropoulou 2012) to specify translation used in texts produced for newspapers rather than other media such as television, radio or the internet.
Scholars who use this term tend to refer to whole articles that are translated from a source language into a target language for publication in foreign newspapers thus consolidating much narrower research areas. Conway (2006, 2010, 2012) draws on Anthropology (Asad 1986 Jordan 2002), and considers some forms of news translation as cultural translation, in which journalists try to explain to one group how another sees the world. These texts do not necessarily contain any translated text as such; rather, they are heuristic acts (Conway 2012: 1003).
Orengo (2005: 175) on the other hand views news translation as a sub-branch of mass media translation, while Bielsa and Bassnett (2009: 2) claim that in news contexts ‘the very definition of translation is challenged and the boundaries of what we might term as translation have been recast’. Their seminal work, Translation in Global News (2009) evolved from the Warwick conference (2006) in which
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international translation scholars gathered to discuss the ever burgeoning questions surrounding the role of translation in the global circulation of news. Bielsa and Bassnett’s analysis focuses on the role of international press agencies in transmitting international news instantly round the globe. The authors investigate the history and working practices of news agencies around the world and the ways in which they employ translation. They also examine the predominant attitudes to translation in the realms of news reporting:
Some of the views expressed by people who prefer to call themselves ‘international journalists’ rather than translators reveal that the way in which they conceive of translation is very different from the way in which linguists or language teachers might (2009: 2).
News translation - and this is one of its key features - occurs in two stages (cf. Jakobson, 2000: 114): first an interlingual translation from the press release issued by an international news agency either into a local news agency’s translated press release, or into the translated news text; then an ‘intralingual’ translation when the localised news text is embedded into a news story by a specific newspaper. The two processes may even occur simultaneously in the way the news text is translated and imbued with new content and nuances. Here it might be useful to identify the different types of text that news translation encompasses:
1. A complete article that has been translated from source to target language. Often they are signed translations. This frequently happens, for example, with an Anglophone newspaper ST that is translated for an Italian Newspaper. It tends to happen less in the other direction. On the other hand, ‘Celebrity’ journalists write for the target culture publication and are translated in-house. For example, Bill Emmott (see chapter 8) writes articles directly for, and are translated by La Stampa, while John Lloyd (see Chapter 8) writes for and is translated by La Republica.
2. A news article that has been lifted almost piecemeal from an International press agency press release and contains direct and
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indirect speech already transposed by the agency. This would undergo a localizing process (see section 3.2.1).
3. A news article that we might construe as ‘cultural translation – where no actual translation takes place but is where one culture is explained to another. However, as Conway points out, a prerequisite for this type of article is ‘openenness to the other.
Otherwise the journalist’s or even the newspaper’s own institutional bias tinges the representation (2012).
4. By far the most common, and the type of article we refer to here, is the news text which is contructed around an international communicative event and includes translated excerpts and quotes embedded within it (see Orengo 2005). This type of article might also encompass material from other sources and texts, thus rendering it a ‘hybrid text’ (see below). Multiple sources problematize the existence and status of the source text as commonly understood in a ‘normal’ translational relationship.
This in turn raises issues of authorship (van Doorslaer 2010; Bielsa and Bassnett 2009).
Therefore, apart from the first type of text, it can be seen that translation is a part, albeit a crucial one, of the complex process of constructing news texts on foreign affairs. Schäffner ultimately asks whether or not we really need to find another term such as transediting in order to refer to translation in journalistic texts? (2012: 879).
The resounding answer is ‘no’. For Schäffner, by substituting ‘translation’ with
‘transediting’, or with any other term, translation will continue to be viewed in the narrow sense of a ‘purely word for word transfer process’ (881). Van Doorslaer (2010: 179) subscribes to a similar view, observing that the discipline still has not managed to establish itself beyond a concept of linguistic transfer in spite of the growing interest in meaning transfer processes in the globalized world.
Nevertheless, Schäffner (2012: 883) sustains that ‘As any translation, news translation or media translation generally, is a textual and a sociocultural process which involves transformations’.
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In accordance with Schäffner and van Doorslaer, this research takes the view that in spite of its constraints and peculiarities, news translation involves quite simply, more or less extended forms of translation. It seems therefore superfluous to talk of ‘recasting’ the boundaries of our field of interest. New translation is, however, a new and developing phenomenon whose ramifications and reach require careful scrutiny within the remit of translation studies research. Similar theoretical and ontological debates surfaced with the diffusion of audio visual translation as theory and practice (see Munday 2008: 184). The space and time constraints inherent to subtitling and the constraints of dubbing such as lip-synch and visual cues provoked discussion as to the relation of this form of meaning transfer to the umbrella term translation. In order to accommodate AVT, and equally it is argued here, in relation to news translation, Díaz-Cintas and Remael (2007: 9) suggest a more ‘flexible, heterogeneous and less static perspective of translation’ that ‘encompasses a broad set of empirical realities and acknowledges the ever-changing nature of the practice’.
Having located news translation within a broader conception of what translational activity entails, Floros (2012: 929) identifies the distinctive characteristic of news translation compared to more ‘traditional’ forms of translation as what he calls ‘radical permutations’. It could be argued that AVT shares this characteristic; however, it is these ‘permutations’ in news translation that we will consider next.
While debate continues as to the name of this type of translational phenomenon, the literature concurs, as we will see below, that the overriding feature of the process of news translation is the hybridity of the resulting news texts (Schäffner and Adab 2001). Firsly, the production of a single news text involves the integration of various source texts, as van Doorslaer (2012: 1048) explains:
‘journalists will base [the] article on several earlier news items, on information and feedback from experts, and possibly also on other national and international coverage on the topic’. Although he does not specify, we imagine that translated information (translated by whom?) is thus invisibly recontextualised (Schäffner
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2008: 3) in the target culture product. Furthermore, he observes ‘translated news texts can be seen as a complex mixture of summarizing, paraphrasing, transforming, supplementing, reorganizing and recontextualizing procedures (ibid.). Kang (2007: 222) defines a news text as ‘a product that is “renegotiated” (in terms of meaning, form and function) to respond to a new context of use’, while Bielsa and Bassnett (2009: 2) state that ‘Information that passes between cultures through news agencies, is not only “translated” in the interlingual sense, it is reshaped, edited, synthesised and transformed for the consumption of a new set of readers’. What is striking about all these descriptions is their abstractness and their lack of agency. Furthermore one wonders what exactly Kang means by
‘”renegotiated” meaning that responds to a new context of use’. Is this a euphemism for ideological manipulation? It would appears that in news translation
‘meaning’ is meaningless and the translational act itself, happens miraculously, automatically, mechanically. We have no perception of the who, the why, or the how.
As we have seen earlier, the textual and semantic changes that take place during these processes can be referred to as localization (see section 3.2.1). However, a significant body of scholarship (Bani 2006; Bassnett 2004, 2005; Bielsa 2007, 2010;
Bielsa and Bassnett 2009; Clausen 2004) use the term domestication (Venuti 1995/2008, see section 3.1) rather than localization to describe dominant translation strategies in the news. As Bielsa and Bassnett (2009: 10) explain, in news translation,
‘the dominant strategy is absolute domestication, as material is shaped in order to be consumed by a target audience’. This might well be due to the ethical and ideological implications of domesticating approaches to meaning transfer. In the following section this perspective is discussed alongside the parallel issue of the invisibility of translation and of the translator.
Ideology, invisibility, and the ethics of 3.4
recontextualization
In his study of the representation of Turkish Cyprus in translated news texts, Floros (2012: 938) argues that translational norms clash with the norms of journalism. A clash which is quickly resolved, he adds, as ‘the norms of the news industry are
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overwhelming’. Floros notes that the ‘dominance of the reporting voice in indirect speech’ blurs the borders between journalists’ commentaries and the actal words spoken. Idealistically, and perhaps naively, he proposes a synergy between journalistic and translational norms that would recognise translation ‘as a particular activity following its own ethics within news production’ (ibid.). Tsai (2012: 1060-1080) suggests that these ‘clashing’ norms could be the focus of research. She posits that the translation strategies adopted in news texts are influenced by commercial rather than ideological interests of the media: ‘The rise of market-driven journalism affords scholars the opportunity to consider how the changing ethos of journalism alters news translation strategies’(1060). While it is arguable that ‘market driven journalism’ is new (see Conboy 2010), or that the ‘ethos of journalism’ has mutated, the fundamental questions are which strategies are used in news translation and why. Here we discuss some of the observations in the literature on the issue. Floros (2012: 929), for instance, challenges the translational strategies employed in news texts and calls for contemplation on the ethics of news translation. He suggests a return to the concept of fidelity in journalistic contexts, although he freely admits this is a utopian ideal. He questions some of Bielsa and Bassnett’s reasonings in order to highlight his point. According to Bielsa and Bassnett, task of the ‘translator of news’ includes:
changing news angles and nuances, when the new informative context justifies it.[…]
[T]he possibility of changing news angles in order to better fulfil the needs and expectations of a different audience pushes the very notion of equivalence to its limit, revealing how different versions of global news events can function in very diverse local contexts. The translator’s visibility and transformative role in news production is directly related to this power to actually change the prevalent news angle or point of view from which events are narrated in order to produce a new text which can function more effectively as news for a different public. (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009: 93)
Floros (2012: 936) asks what criteria are we to use in order to establish when
‘changing news angles’ is justified? Furthermore, what does it mean for a text to
’function more effectively’ as news for a different public? Surely that depends on
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the aim of the text producer – translator or journalist – but the authors barely broach the subject of ethics and ideological manipulations.
In a similar way, one might question the assumptions in the following:
It goes without saying that a certain degree of freedom in text production (although based on several other source texts) goes hand in hand with adaptation, reconsideration and reperspectivization on the basis of the new needs in the target text situation. (van Doorslaer 2012:1050 italics are mine)
Why does it go without saying, and what are these needs in the target text? Are these not euphemisms for manipulation?
And again in Kang (2007: 240), we find ‘the entextualizing function of institutional news translation inevitably entails a reformulation of the source text in response to priorities and values relevant within the target context’. As van Doorslaer explains,
‘Kang refers to the concept of “entextualization” for describing the process in news translation in which the original text is made subordinate to the journalistic purpose of recontextualization’ (Kang 2007: 221). Van Doorslaer (2012: 1046) himself observes ‘When a journalator selects a topic and creates or frames his new narrative, parts of the story will inevitably be modified during the translation process (transediting)’. Thus, some researchers appear to accept the ‘inevitability’ of domesticating interventions, without posing the questions of why this should be so, and what the effects might be.
It has often been said that communicability, accessibility, and speed are three of the main criteria for producing news translations for the target reader (Bani 2006: 37; Bielsa 2010: 10; Bielsa and Bassnett 2009: 91). This has a series of consequences. Firstly, domesticating strategies prevail as it is ‘assumed’, by whom we are not sure, that these are more easily acceptable to the target audience.
Domestication leads to transparency, and thus to invisibility, whereby the translational act is obscured from the reader (Bani 2006: 40; Bassnett 2004, 2005;
Bielsa 2007, 2010; Bielsa and Bassnett 2009; Holland 2006, Kang 2007; Schäffner 2005, 2008). As Bassnett and Schäffner (2010: 10) observe, ‘Laypeople are normally
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unconscious of the fact that they are reading a text in translation’. Instant communication makes translation processes in global communication invisible, and
‘only by challenging its invisibility, which obscures the social conditions under which translation is performed as well as its role in mediating between cultures, will the mechanisms of cultural globalization be more fully understood’ (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009: 280). Bielsa (2010: 170) reflects that the domesticating and gatekeeping practices imposed by the large international news outlets raise questions as to:
whether international news, for instance, can indeed reveal a truthful and plural account of events and different social realities to global audiences, or are in fact falsifying a familiar image of the world to western audiences made up of what powerful news organizations perceive as newsworthy to their clients and publics.
Correlated these concerns is the question of the positionality of the ‘translator’, journalist-translator.
3.4.1 Invisibility of translation and the translator in news contexts
The notion of invisibility in translation is one which Lawrence Venuti (1992, 1998, 1995/2008) brought to the fore (see section 3.1) during what are now conventionally termed as the cultural and ideological turns in translation theory. Initially used in literary contexts, Venuti used the term to indicate a ‘fluent’, ‘transparent’, domesticating translation that did not disturb the reader. Simultaneously, it erases the mediating figure of the translator. The concept can be more than aptly applied to the case of news translation, and indeed to the figure of the translator in news contexts. To begin with, current practices in international news production blur the boundaries between the figure of the translator and journalist (Bielsa and Bassnet 2009: 62-63; van Doorslaer 2012; see chapter 8). Frequently, news room practices combine the two. As van Doorslaer observes (2012: 1049):
The journalist very often functions as an invisible translator, the invisibility being the consequence of the fact that translation has not only been integrated into
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journalism, but has even been effaced by it in the perception of readers, listeners and viewers.
Schäffner (2008: 3-24) addresses the invisibility of translation in political communication and observes the ways in which translation intertwines with media discourse in the ‘cross-lingual and cross-cultural recontextualisation processes’
(ibid.: 22). She also emphasises that ‘in the recontextualization chains from political speech to its (transformed) publication in the mass media and continuing references to it in subsequent media texts, power is at play as well’(ibid.). Thus, the dominant international news agencies and mass media are in turn quoted by other mass media creating a situation of asymmetry in representational capacity. In other words, some ‘voices’ are heard more than others. Schäffner provides an example with the recontextualization and possible mistranslation of a phrase attributed to former Iranian President Ahmadinejad, that Israel should be ‘wiped off the map’.
Schäffner points out that although there are several possible translations of the source utterance, this particular rendering has become the most frequently cited translation of Ahmadinejad’s original words, and actually discursively constructed as being his own words, thus demonstrating that there is a direct, though usually invisible link between politics, media and translation (Bassnett and Schäffner 2010:
2). The next section focuses on this very issue and examines the nexus between political discourse, news and (invisible) translation.