News translation: global or cosmopolitan connections?

From globalization theory to the new cosmopolitanism: the new visibility of translation

Globalization has led to an exponential increase in translation as a key mediator of intercultural communication. Translation – part of the shared languages and linguistic competencies that are a key infrastructure of global communication (Held et al., 1999: 345) – allows the global circulation of meaning and shapes the nature of the discourses that are disseminated in different localities. Contemporary globalization has witnessed the appearance of English as a global lingua franca, but this phenomenon has not led to a decline in the significance of translation. On the one hand, people whose native language is not English are constantly translating themselves into the dominant global language in order to communicate beyond their own locales (Cronin, 2003: 60). On the other, consumers prefer to use their own language for access to informational goods, which has led to a considerable growth of Internet content in languages other than English, while the localization industry has similarly experienced an unprecedented expansion (Pym, 2004). However, globalization theory has remained predominantly silent about the fundamental role of translation in mediating global information flows, assuming that global texts can automatically be received by audiences and obscuring the crucial intervention of translation in the production of a multiplicity of local versions of global news events.

The invisibility of translation in much globalization theory contrasts with its prominence in some key accounts of what has been called the new cosmopolitanism, which addresses the central importance of translation in a context in which the coexistence of plural traditions rather than the convergence towards a single global culture is emphasized. Thus, as Chris Rumford (2008) has argued, social theories of cosmopolitanism question the strong vision of the singularity of the world, which is very marked in some globalization theory, emphasizing a multiplicity of perspectives and the interaction between different traditions (p. 1). Paralleling this development, attention to the homogenizing spread of a simplified form of global English has increasingly given way to a new perception of the cultural and political significance of multilingualism and its complexities. In this context, processes of cultural hybridization and localization are highlighted as important ways through which the local and the national are redefined through their interaction with the global.

In a cosmopolitan outlook where openness to and interaction with others assume a primary role, in which relationships between different cultures and traditions are underlined, translation can provide a means of approaching and conceptualizing this type of interactions. Thus, Ulrich Beck (2006) points out that

Cosmopolitan competence … forces us to develop the art of translation and bridge-building. This involves two things: on the one hand, situating and relativizing one’s own form of life within other horizons of possibility; on the other, the capacity to see oneself from the perspective of cultural others and to give this practical effect in one’s own experience through the exercise of boundary-trascending imagination. (p. 89)

On the other hand, Gerard Delanty (2006) argues that cosmopolitan processes ‘take the form of translations between things that are different’ (p. 43) and uses the notion of cultural translation to focus on how one culture interprets itself in light of the encounter with the other and constantly undergoes change as a result (Delanty, 2009: 193–198).

Beck and Delanty’s conceptions of the role of translation in relation to cosmopolitanism are compelling because they are the product of a view of translation which implies much more than the linguistic transfer of information from one language to the other, appealing rather to an experience which mobilizes our relationship to the other as well as our conception of ourselves. Cosmopolitanism, understood in these terms, comes very close to a conception of translation which challenges translation as transfer and puts in the centre a view of translation as the experience of the foreign, such as Antoine Berman’s (1992) and more generally the German tradition from Goethe and the Romantics to Benjamin. This relevant connection between cosmopolitanism and translation around the notion of the experience of the foreign will be taken up below when relevant strategies for translating others in the news are discussed.

News translation as an increasingly recognized area within translation studies

News translation is a subject of growing significance within the discipline of translation studies. Whereas only 10 years ago conceptualizations and empirical studies of news translation were rare, today it is a recognized area of study, as evidenced by the presence of specific panels on news translation in recent editions of major international conferences (International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies Conferences, 2009 and 2012; European Society for Translation Studies Conference, 2013) and by the publication of special issues dedicated to the subject in leading journals such as Language and Intercultural Communication (2005), Across Languages and Cultures (2010) and Meta (2012). There is a growing and diverse body of scholars devoting attention to news translation – the articles gathered in these special issues provide a good selection of authors currently working in the field – in areas ranging from the translation of television news to comparative analyses of newspapers and webs.

Translation in Global News (Bielsa and Bassnett, 2009) is to date the only book length study of news translation published in English. As the title of the work suggests, we adopted a global perspective for the study of news translation, focusing specifically on news agencies, and combining a textual analysis of translation with an ethnographic approach to translation practices in news organizations. As the first study of this kind, the book contains some pioneering findings about news translation relating to organizations, agents and texts. With respect to organizations, news agencies appear as vast translation agencies, designed for the effective transmission of news texts across cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries. This refers, on the one hand, to a historical connection between news agencies and translation and, on the other, to the pervasiveness of translation in the production of news. Indeed, the world’s first news agency, Agence Havas (Agence France Presse’s predecessor), first appeared in 1832 as a translation agency. Translation is still today a very significant part of the output of the global news agencies, which typically produce newswires in the five or six dominant languages of the market. News agencies’ regional desks thus serve as centres for linguistic exchange between the different newswires, as well as for gathering and transmitting the output of the area’s local bureaus.

With respect to agents, global news organizations such as the news agencies rarely employ translators as such. It is the journalists or news editors who are engaged in translation work as a very important part of their news writing task. The fact that they have not been explicitly trained in translation or that they do not see themselves as translators but rather as journalists does not mean that they are amateurs or insufficiently prepared to do translation work. For instance, one of the entry tests for working as news editor at Agence France Presse or Reuters is translating a piece of news. In the news agencies (as more generally in many other news organizations), it is felt that only journalists are specifically prepared to do translation work, which is not perceived as being substantially different than the writing or editing of original news texts. Rather than viewing the absence in translation training as a lack in translation skills or competence, media translation thus forces translation scholars to extend their definition of who is a translator.

Finally, with respect to texts, news translations can be generally characterized as rewritings, employing André Lefevere’s (1992) useful term (p. 8). News translation entails the thoroughgoing modification of texts in order to make them suitable for new audiences. Among the most recurrent of these modifications are the following: change of title and of lead (informative subtitle), change in the order of paragraphs, adding of new background information which is of contextual relevance to the new readers, elimination of unnecessary information which is deemed to be no longer relevant (or alternatively already known) to the target readers. Therefore, translated texts appear in many ways more like new texts, specifically designed for the new readers to which they are targeted. The textual practice of news translation thus challenges some extended principles in translation studies, such as that of equivalence or of the central importance of authorship.

More generally, we related the ubiquity of translation in the news agencies to its invisibility, referring to the double invisibility of news translation in relation to two factors: on the one hand, to the privileging of a domesticating strategy which conforms to the expectations of the target reader, privileges fluency and makes the translation transparent, thus hiding its very intervention and, on the other, to the very successful integration of translation within journalism, the fact that it is not perceived as being in any way different than the writing or editing of original news reports. The predominance of certain translation strategies that make translation invisible will become the starting point of a reflection on the nature of news translation in a cosmopolitan context which is taken up below.

Media studies: lost in translation?

Whereas news translation has attracted significant interest in the discipline of translation studies in recent years, media studies continue to be predominantly blind to its key mediating role in intercultural communication and still largely apply a monolingual lens to the study of news production and transmission. New research on the role of the media in a cosmopolitan context adds a very welcome empirical dimension to the study of cosmopolitanism. However, these recent, very interesting studies often fail to even notice the relevance of translation or to specifically reflect on the multilingual nature of news production, transmission and reception. Thus, for example, Alexa Robertson’s (2010) Mediated Cosmopolitanism explores whether the media can help create solidarities and connections with distant others through the analysis of reports broadcast on eight different television channels in different languages. Her comparative analysis allows her to question the accuracy of claims about the homogenization of news in the global media (Robertson, 2010: 37) and to argue that different newsrooms provide different windows to the world (e.g. she contrasts an emphasis on cooperation and proximity to ordinary people in Swedish reports to British more distanced, objectivist reporting, which tends to focus more on armed conflict). However, she fails to reflect on the multilingual aspect of her sample, nor does her study leave any space for the examination of how information is communicated (i.e. translated) across newsrooms and media. Shani Orgad’s (2012) Media Representation and the Global Imagination, which explicitly seeks to address how texts, images and discourses that originate in one culture are reappropriated and transformed in a different locale (p. 39), offers a penetrating reflection on how the media represent us and others, and of the possibility of distancing ourselves from our taken-for-granted beliefs through forms of estrangement promoted by the media. A key issue of concern is whether we can become aware and hospitable to others without erasing their difference. Noticing the significance of translation in this context (after all, the others represented in the media often speak languages that we cannot understand) would have no doubt sharpened the insights of her book.

This contrasts with an incipient awareness of translation and its influence on news production and reception in interdisciplinary research on international journalism and foreign news. Thus, Kevin Williams (2011) acknowledges the significance of translation and relates it, on the one hand, to the work of foreign correspondents in interpreting cultural difference and making the unfamiliar familiar to their audiences and, on the other, to implications for how readers, viewers and listeners around the world understand what is happening and the meaning of events (pp. 27–28). Research on foreign correspondents as key intercultural mediators was pioneered by Ulf Hannerz’s studies. Remarkably, in his earlier, exploratory work, Hannerz centrally addressed the importance of language and of problems of cultural translation, concluding, perhaps rather hastily, that ‘newspeople do not seem much given to deciphering foreign meanings at all. The working assumption, apparently, is that understanding is not a problem, things are what they seem to be’ (Hannerz, 1996: 120). In his later, book length ethnographic study of foreign news, language knowledge of correspondents is still the object of some attention (Hannerz, 2004: 85–89, 140–141, 153), but problems of cultural translation seem to recede to the background in favour of a focus on story lines and frames. More recently, Ralph Beliveau, Oliver Hahn and Guido Ipsen have discussed the role of foreign correspondents as mediators and translators between cultures, showing the need for interdisciplinary approaches to the study of foreign correspondents and their work. However, they do not provide more than a summary examination of relevant analytical perspectives (from anthropology, semiotics and cultural studies) that could be applied to future research in this direction (Beliveau et al., 2011).

The publication of a special issue in Journalism (2011) deserves here a special mention because it illustrates both the potential and the dangers of the interdisciplinary study of news translation. The aim of the issue is to examine the BBC World Service as a diasporic contact zone, putting transcultural journalistic practices and the politics of translation at the centre. This angle is potentially groundbreaking, disclosing an important aspect of journalistic practice at the BBC in a radically new light. However, the attempt is also marked by conceptual confusion, revealed in an excessive zeal in artificially separating concepts of translating, trans-editing and transposing, as well as by a tendency to reduce translation to ‘simply linguistic transformation’ (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2011: 201). Significantly, the most interesting articles from the point of view of relevant new insights on news translation (Cheesman and Nohl, 2011; Podkalicka, 2011) are the interdisciplinary contributions that engage more fully with existing literature in translation studies.

Turning to the implications for how audiences around the world come to understand the meaning of events through the media, there is a line of work around the central concept of domestication, which revolves about how news events are ‘told in ways that render them more familiar, more comprehensible and more compatible for consumption by different national audiences’ (Gurevitch et al., 1991: 205). The concept, which served from the start to question simplistic views about news homogenization in the context of globalization, has led in more recent years to fruitful comparative research on the nature of global news transmission and circulation (Alasuutari et al., 2013; Clausen, 2004; see also all the literature cited in the latter).

An approach to news transmission as domestication of the foreign can serve as the starting point for synergetic interdisciplinary work that places translation at the centre of the current debate because the notion of domestication is also used, albeit in a different way, in the discipline of translation studies. ¹ This initiative is taken up below. More generally, it is potentially in the area of media studies that research on news translation can have a major impact, on the one hand, in providing empirical evidence of the globalization and localization of news texts and, on the other, in promoting a broader understanding of journalistic work as an influential instance of intercultural communication.

Structure of the journalistic field

The journalistic field is characterized by two basic determining factors. The first refers to its heteronomy, that is, to the primacy of the commercial value of news. The modern journalistic field emerged in the middle of the 19th century when factual information became a marketable commodity and modern newspapers were linked to information and no longer to opinion. Unlike the literary field, it does not possess a relative autonomy from the market. It is its essentially heteronomous character which leads Bourdieu (1998) to indicate two factors which in his view structurally shape the journalistic field: on the one hand, competition for the newest news and, on the other, the permanent surveillance to which journalists subject their competitor’s activities (pp. 71–72). Journalists permanently seek to differentiate themselves from others, but competition, according to Bourdieu, rather than favouring originality and diversity tends to generate uniformity. Bourdieu has not been the only one to criticize this tendency to uniformity. We can find another penetrating critique in Mark Pedelty’s (1995) ethnography War Stories, where he points out how editors are even prepared to sacrifice the truth in order to conform to the pattern established by the leading news organizations and will not publish stories that deviate too much from what appears in these media. More generally, the much cherished journalistic principles of impartiality and objectivity are also linked to the commercial need of catering for as many clients as possible.

The issue of heteronomy and market constraint is relevant to the study of news translation, and helps to explain, for example, some of the differences between news translation and literary translation, such as those concerning the less important role of authorship in the field of news. Whereas the literary translator is subservient to the author of an original work, the news translator does not owe the same degree of respect and faithfulness to an often unsigned piece of news and has much more room for rewriting and modifying originals in important ways. On the other hand, the time limitations of journalistic work in the context of competition for the newest news place strong demands on translation, which must respond to increasing pressures to reach an ideal of near-instantaneity (Cronin, 2003: 49). Finally, the use of domesticating strategies designed towards favouring comprehensibility and easiness of reception of target readers must also be viewed as responding to commercial concerns of maximizing customer use.

A second structural factor of the journalistic field which is perhaps more significant in a cosmopolitan context but has received far less attention in the literature refers to the very distinction between domestic and foreign news, or national and international news or, in the terminology now often preferred by news organizations, local and world news. This distinction has been at the core of modern journalism since its inception and continues to be today a major structural factor in the field of news, even when it increasingly fails to reflect the contemporary realities of a world of proliferating transnational connections. Thus, Ulf Hannerz (2004) refers to ‘translocalities’ as sites that draw journalists because of the people who pass through them and not because they are localities with a newsworthiness of their own (p. 206), whereas the term ‘global domestic politics’ is suggested to reflect the blurring of the distinction between foreign and domestic news in a cosmopolitan context (Beck, 2006: 2; Robertson, 2010: 77). On the other hand, Gurevitch et al. (1991) point to the erosion of the traditional priorities accorded to domestic and foreign stories in benefit of the latter, as news events of potential global interest become staples of television news services around the world, in part because of the availability of ‘dramatic’ footage (pp. 205–206). However, in spite of proliferating transnational connections and the growing significance of global news events (Gurevitch et al., 1991: 213; Palmer, 1983: 213), the distinction between domestic and foreign news continues to be a key structural element in the field of news that has widespread consequences for the organizational patterns of news organizations. Most generally, this means that parallel structures for news gathering exist in terms of international and local news networks, and that news organizations employ both local journalists as well as specialized international journalists who are able to cater for the needs of their domestic audiences in terms of foreign news. Thus, what circulates as international news worldwide is not a rewriting of reports originally created from a local, foreign perspective, but has already been conceived from its inception as international news for distant audiences. In other words, it is our domestic journalists who are reporting on foreign news, so that we rarely get a foreign perspective on foreign news. The ironies involved in such a division are perceptively expressed by Mark Pedelty (1995), who argues that a

… problem with international news is just that: it remains inter-national in a world whose major trends and influences are increasingly global. Much of the world’s news coverage is still arranged according to national boundaries and constructed in terms of national interests. Readerships are arranged and spoken to as nation-state collectives, rather than as part of a global (or local) community. Most ‘foreign’ news in the U.S. media, for example, is really national news, produced by and for American reporters and institutions. We are reporting the world to ourselves. There is little active communication with those whom we are ostensibly ‘covering’. (p. 222, emphasis in original)

With reference to translation, this means that reports written by local journalists are seldom translated into other languages, as they are primarily destined for local consumption. This is the case even of local reporters working for global news organizations (such as for example local journalists in Reuters’ Madrid bureau, who write Spanish language reports for the Spanish market). International journalists, rather than translating news reports produced by the local journalists, write their own versions destined to the international market. These already intercultural news items (or foreign interpretations of local news events) will in turn be more likely to be translated for other markets. More generally, dual networks for news production reduce the need for translation and minimize the time it takes to circulate news worldwide in different languages and to different markets (for a discussion of this aspect with reference to parallel reporting structures in news agencies see Bielsa, 2007).

From the point of view of the structures that shape news production, one must not only highlight that the foreign news we receive is filtered through domestic voices, views and frames but also that international journalists often find insurmountable barriers to access foreign events. One of these barriers can indeed be language, especially in the case of special correspondents who are sent to a region to cover specific events and who do not speak the local language (the so called ‘parachuters’). Another is knowledge of the local reality and lack of local connections. And another, especially in circumstances of war, is that of basic access to the places where events are unfolding. Chris Paterson poignantly reflects on the central paradox that results from the structural limitations of covering distant events in extreme situations, in this case with reference to the Bosnian war:

News agencies could report only a small portion of the Bosnian civil war, those portions involving dramatic events occurring within the reach of agency journalists. But that war, the war of singular, seemingly unconnected dramas in a few locations, became the war known to the world, the war the world reacted to, and thus, the war the journalists themselves would continue to focus their efforts upon despite the knowledge of a much larger, much more complex, all but unknown war underway just out of their reach. (Paterson, 1997: 150–151)

Existing difficulties of access or of understanding in the face of radical cultural and linguistic difference are rarely addressed in the news. Neither are the basic commercial limitations of international news coverage the object of a sustained consideration or critical reflection in mainstream news.

Domesticating the foreign

Foreign correspondents play an important role in intercultural mediation as interpreters of the foreign who transmit their version of distant events to domestic audiences. They contribute not only to the increasing awareness of the world as a single place (Robertson’s (1992: 8) subjective dimension of globalization) but also shape the images and interpretations that media users have of other cultures, peoples and places. Indeed, because of geographical and cultural distance, their interpretations of the foreign can be more influential than equivalent accounts of local events. As Ralph Beliveau et al. (2011) remark,

Local events give consumers direct experience, and allow them to apply critical correctives through either their own experiences or through alternate sources. This cannot happen with foreign news. Media audiences need the information provided by foreign correspondents in order to perceive and to build up images of foreign countries. This, in turn, also means that foreign correspondents create and transfer images of foreign countries. (p. 130)

For analytical purposes, two distinct components can be distinguished in the foreign correspondent’s task: interpretation of foreign events in their original context, on the one hand, and transmission of these interpretations to home audiences in a way that enhances comprehension and minimizes misunderstanding on the other. These tasks are often perceived to be contradictory. Thus, for instance, the need for objectivity and neutrality in interpreting foreign events can be seen to clash with demands to conform to the values and preferences of domestic audiences in order to facilitate reception (Alasuutari et al., 2013: 695; Beliveau et al., 2011: 135; Nossek, 2004). The disparate and often contradictory demands of foreign news production are best captured by the notion of domestication of the foreign, a term which has been introduced above to designate the way in which news events are told in ways that render them more familiar and comprehensible to target audiences, thus facilitating reception.

However, the notion of domestication adopted in this article will not be the one that, since Gurevitch et al.’s (1991) seminal contribution, has gained currency in media studies, leading to abundant empirical evidence that global news events are told in diverging ways at the local level. Instead, Lawrence Venuti’s account of domesticating and foreignizing translation is proposed in order to enhance the explanatory power of the notion of domestication as already employed in journalism research because it specifies the ethical and cultural implications of domesticating the foreign. In Venuti’s terms, a domesticating translation reduces the difference of the other to a false familiarity and hides translation’s intervention under the appearance of fluency, producing the illusion of transparency. Foreignizing translation, on the contrary, disrupts the cultural codes that prevail in the translating language in order to do justice to the difference of the foreign text (Venuti, 2008: 15–16). The central issue behind the distinction between domesticating and foreignizing translation is how to approach the difference of the foreign text. The history of translation reveals that the dominant mode of domesticating translation has been one in which the author is brought closer to the reader, whereas the marginal mode of foreignizing translation brings readers closer to the author, even at the peril of making reception more demanding (Schleiermacher, 1992). The problems with domesticating translation are twofold. First, by making the other falsely familiar, it ends up colluding the difference of the other to sameness. Second, it hides translation’s very intervention under the appearance of fluency and ‘masquerades as a true semantic equivalence when it in fact inscribes the foreign text with a partial interpretation …’ (Venuti, 2008: 16).

Foreignizing translations are rare, more so in the field of news, which is dominated by market constraints and the need to make news texts easily comprehensible to audiences. Yet, it is in foreignizing translations, which are doubly interrogative (Venuti, 2008: 20), that an image of the foreign is constructed which does not deny its fundamental strangeness while also interrogating prevalent conceptions in the receiving culture. Moreover, given the fact that, as Pedelty stated, we are reporting the world to ourselves – that our foreign news are, as it were, domestically produced – and that others, their voices and interpretations of events, are largely absent from the news, a translation in which a trace of the difference of the other can be preserved becomes extremely meaningful in this medium. The best example of the fundamental strangeness of hearing the voice of the other through foreignizing translation in the news is to be found in Roger Silverstone (2007) opening reflection to the book Media and Morality, where he recalls an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during the war in Afghanistan with an Afghani blacksmith who explained that his village was being bombed because ‘Al Qaeda had killed many Americans and their donkeys and had destroyed some of their castles’ (p. 1). As Silverstone (2007) incisively maintains, the unfamiliarity of this voice

had everything to do with, was overdetermined by, the blacksmith’s capacity to offer an account of us as well as to us: we, in the West, with our donkeys and our castles, we with our losses, we in our equivalence. (p. 1, emphasis in original) ²

The placing of a translated account at the centre of a discussion on media and morality in Silverstone’s book is telling because a reflection on different strategies for translating the difference of the other is at the centre of an ethical debate on translation that has implications for both media studies and approaches to cosmopolitanism as openness to the world and to others.

As we have seen, only a foreignizing translation allows to communicate to some degree the difference of others through the news, thus facilitating a degree of cosmopolitan openness, whereas domesticating translation, by colluding otherness with sameness, precludes the possibility of questioning our cultural codes. Thus, what is at stake is here no longer the fact that the news are fundamental in generating a consciousness of the world as a whole, but whether the news can create spaces of cosmopolitan openness to the world and to others. In order to answer this question, which is being centrally addressed by recent work on mediated cosmopolitanism, such as the two books by Robertson and Orgad already alluded to, we must examine how others are translated to western audiences in the news and identify how certain translation strategies can be conducive to cosmopolitan openness while others are not. In other words, it is necessary to question certain views that predominate in the sociological literature about translation as the possibility of transcending ethnocentrism and as inherently conducive to cosmopolitan openness (a critique of both Beck and Delanty). As Venuti (1998) reminds us, translation is a fundamentally ethnocentric act (p. 10): translation is an inherently violent process of reduction of the fundamental difference of the other in order to create intelligibility, and ethnocentrism must be understood as a central tendency or resistance in any act of translation (see also Berman, 1992 and Bielsa, 2014).

Approaching interconnectedness

A focus on translation not only provides a unique perspective on processes of domestication of the foreign and the cultural implications thereof, it also illuminates the nature of contemporary interconnectedness by closely examining how news texts circulate across geographical, cultural and linguistic boundaries and the transformations they undergo as a result. Conversely, these very transformations are indicative of the complex patterns of interconnectedness that today shape news production and transmission across the globe.

Modern journalism is global from its inception. The field of global news was established during the second half of the 19th century, when the use of the telegraph became widespread and major news agencies emerged and expanded their worldwide connections (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 1998). These infrastructures responded to the rapidly growing appetites of metropolitan publics for news from around the world, giving rise to what has been described as the globalization of the event (Palmer, 1983: 213). The high degree of interconnectedness between the local and the global and between different national fields is made visible in the large number of texts that circulate across linguistic and cultural boundaries in the form of translation. This multiplicity of international connections and influences across borders tends to be obscured in research with a primarily national focus, or also in a type of comparative research that emphasizes divergences rather than borrowings (approaches based on notions of domestication of the foreign fall into this latter category).

References have been made above to the double invisibility of translation in the news. However, a closer examination reveals not only the ubiquity of translation but also perhaps a rather paradoxical more visible presence of translation in the context of global, or perhaps cosmopolitan, coverage. Major international news events are now increasingly reported in the press not only by those invisible translators, the foreign correspondents, but also discussed in articles that have originated in foreign news contexts and the translation of which is most often signed either by an individual translator or by a translation agency. In other words, domestically produced foreign news often coexists side by side with visibly translated news pieces, at least outside the American and British press, in the more cosmopolitan orientated newspapers. ³ This is yet another expression of the blurring of clear demarcating lines between foreign and domestic news.

From a cosmopolitan point of view, the presence of this kind of translations in the news is very interesting because in them, we find foreign voices, views and opinions on the nature of events that can feed on our conceptions of others and of ourselves and thus promote cosmopolitan openness. Two different types of such translated sources can readily be highlighted: the work of the most internationally distinguished foreign correspondents, on the one hand, and reflexive accounts of international coverage of global and local news events in different media, on the other. First, renowned foreign correspondents are journalists who excel in their work as interpreters of the foreign and as a consequence become appreciated in different national contexts, thus overcoming the domestic/foreign dichotomy and speaking to different international audiences. An appropriate example who has recently figured prominently in the press of several countries is John Carlin, whose articles on Nelson Mandela’s death appeared simultaneously in English and Spanish in British, Spanish and Mexican newspapers. Moreover, Carlin not only overcomes the national/international divide but also publishes his journalistic work in books, which have in turn become the object of other forms of translation, including intersemiotic translation, in this instance the film Invictus, based on Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy. These diverse and proliferating translations disseminate Carlin’s journalistic work to new publics far beyond the original audience that foreign correspondents can initially expect and multiply the potential cosmopolitan impact of their interpretations of the foreign.

A second form of cosmopolitan interconnectedness through translation can be observed in the proliferation of reflexive accounts of international coverage, with reference both to how major global events are reported internationally and to the global repercussion of significant local events, such as for example Princess Cristina’s charge over tax fraud in the Spanish press (El País, 2014). This is a type of coverage that is fundamentally different to the reporting of global news events such as New Year celebrations across the world to television audiences (Orgad, 2012: 134–148), which is at best only conducive to forms of banal cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2006: 19) and not to genuine cosmopolitan openness. In the former, more reflexive type of cosmopolitan coverage an episode often prompts the appearance of pieces discussing international coverage that amplify stories of global and local news events, of others and of ourselves, implicitly questioning unilateral interpretations of events and enabling readers to see themselves through the eyes of others. The cosmopolitan impact of this type of reflexivity in the news can be defended even in the case of primarily negative views of foreign coverage, such as for example those found in the French media about the international coverage of the 2005 riots in France (Orgad, 2012: 90–107).

Independently of whether the cosmopolitan potential of this type of reflexivity is accomplished, it remains important to make visible the high degree of interconnectedness and intertextuality in the news through an empirical analysis that not only focuses on domestication processes and comparative divergences but also on the multiplicity of connections and influences across borders.