Abstract
Despite the undeniable fact that translation is vital in the production and dissemination of international news, thereby playing a political role in shaping and manipulating news events, it was not until mid-2000s that journalistic translation gained its due scholarly attention. Journalistic Translation Research Goes Global, whose collected papers were originally published as a special issue in the international translation studies journal Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, charts the latest landscape in the field of journalistic translation, highlighting the geographical, theoretical, and methodological variety of relevant studies. Apart from the introductory part, this collection is composed of eight chapters, in which contributors study the practice, role, and impact of journalistic translation worldwide using various theoretical concepts and methods.
The distinguished editor of the volume, Roberto A. Valdeón, also the editor-in-chief of Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice and the general editor of Benjamins Translation Library, has made significant contributions to journalistic translation studies, particularly in the historical importance of translation to news production and the conceptual problems in journalistic translation. In 2015, he published an article entitled “Fifteen years of journalistic translation research and more” to survey the emergence and development of journalistic translation as a new subfield of translation studies. On this basis, in the introductory chapter, he presents the recent development of journalistic translation research from 2015 to 2020, highlighting its interaction with other adjacent disciplines. The following chapters explore translation in journalism from a variety of angles. Some emphasize translation strategies and the role of journalists in translation, some employ discourse analytical and linguistic approaches, some are sociologically oriented and concerned with the relation between translation and power, and others have closer ties with journalism research.
As a new subfield of translation studies, journalistic translation research adopts various methodologies from translation studies. In Chapter 3, Guerrero examines the translation strategies employed by a Spanish digital newspaper in translating English tweets about former American president Donald Trump into Spanish. It is revealed that paraphrasing, literal translation, and nontranslation strategies are used in translating tweets. Kamyanets draws on the study of evaluation in translation in Chapter 4, discussing different types of evaluation in Ukrainian opinion articles and the shifts in their English translations. The results show a general tendency toward reducing the intensity of evaluation and metaphorical strength in the translation of opinion articles. In Chapter 7, Havumetsä exploits the translatorial action of journalists by examining how a Finnish journalist reported on a Russian speech in three different forms.
Journalistic translation scholars have also shown a keen interest in discourse analytical approaches. In Chapter 2, Riggs explores stylistic issues in news translation and how they contribute to shaping journalistic representation, focusing on Muslim groups and French society by examining news articles from the online versions of two English newspapers about a terrorist attack in France. In Chapter 5, Gu and Tipton apply a critical discourse analysis approach to probe the Chinese Premier’s annual press conferences, finding that self-referential terms by government-affiliated interpreters are used to support the legitimacy of the government and convey “collective intentionality.” A similar approach is applied in Đorđević’s research in Chapter 8, which investigates the translation of headlines and leads from Reuters news articles into Serbian, focusing on the discursive strategy of argumentation. It is interestingly found that Serbian media tend to adapt news to show affiliation to the government.
Sociology has benefited translation scholars a lot on a wide range of topics, and journalistic translation studies have gained enlightenments from sociological approaches as well. In Chapter 1, Boulanger and Gagnon turn to the concept of “symbolic power” to examine how the anglophone and francophone press in Canada mediated the concept of “transparency” from 2001 to 2008. The results indicate that both the English- and French-Canadian press rely considerably on banks as authoritative sources, thus forming a bank-centric view on transparency to suit the interests of powerful economic agents.
Moreover, translation scholars have borrowed many concepts from communication studies, such as gatekeeping, framing, and convergence. Drawing on convergence in journalism, Abudayeh and Dubbati in Chapter 6 inquire into the strategies used by six Arabic news channels to translate some of Donald Trump’s most controversial comments and analyze their impact on transferring Trump’s discursive ethos.
In all, this volume presents the geographical diversity of the contemporary journalistic translation studies. Nevertheless, the majority of contributors are from European, North American and Asian countries, with a lack of researchers from South American and African countries. Second, journalistic translation is an interface between translation and communication studies, but research adopting communication theories and methodologies in this book are not given enough mention or development. Despite these minor issues, this timely publication is an indispensable and valuable resource for professionals and graduate students to trace the latest developments in journalistic translation studies and explore new methodological paths in this field.