On the [translated] record: Journalistic translation and creative agency in India’s multilingual reporting

Multilingualism in Indian news

Multilingualism takes on various definitions in scholarly literature. To Davier (2014), multilingualism describes a space of coexisting languages with individuals of varying linguistic abilities, and he refers to plurilingualism in the situational setting where people actively engage in multiple languages. For this study, a multilingual person is someone able to go between languages with oral proficiency, or the ability to speak two or more languages without the need for a translator but with variable functionality in reading and writing those languages. Most Indians are exposed to multiple languages throughout their lives but actually interact monolingually (De Swaan, 2001: 63). Lingual ability, acquired by birth and through literacy, enables border-crossing between linguistic communities and facilitates communication (Longxi, 2014: 244–5). The distribution of language and literacy across India imbues some with opportunities to speak multiple languages while others have no daily need to go between. In India today, language bifurcates between a necessary communication tool and a discriminatory identifier. Multilingualism in India marks status—social, political, and economic—through linguistic overlaps and exclusions that determine the spaces that individuals can inhabit as well as the information they can access.

Census data ¹ conceptualizes the spread of language and shows the complexity in defining a single form of Hindi. Census surveyors asked respondents to name their mother tongue; this returned 19,569 different languages across India. Undergoing “linguistic methods for rational grouping,” these 19,500-plus were classified into 22 scheduled languages. In 2011, 57 languages were filed under Hindi, and more than 528 million respondents named one of these varieties as their mother tongue. This demonstrates how Hindi is deemed a majority language in India while incorporating distinguishable variations and incomprehensibility between Hindis. As the primary language in the northern region of the country, Hindi in all its iterations holds sway (Tillin, 2013: 3). New Delhi forms the core of this Hindi heartland, surrounded by Hindi-dominant states. Punjab is the nearest state with an alternative official language to Hindi. The neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh has immense influence on Indian politics, and other states like Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan (also Hindi states) are respectively the poorest and the largest by land area. ² So much happens within these zones that affect the law and order of the entire country when the central government in New Delhi responds.

Journalists enter linguistic publics by reporting from sources, a key part of on-the-job, in-the-field translation work. Through writing, journalists contribute to public good by communicating to and connecting through diverse publics. However, journalists navigate these shifts between communities, some overlapping in a collage of identities while others stay strictly apart. Multilingual journalists teeter in India’s linguistic milieus as they translate through language—especially English-language journalists sourcing largely from Hindi or regional languages, but likewise Hindi- and regional-language journalists—and through culture—like urban-rural, literate-illiterate, or conservative-liberal.

Translation in multilingual news systems

Translation epitomizes journalism, compiling information from multi-source situations to synthesize threads together in writing; however, many multilingual journalists resist the label translator (Biesla and Bassnett, 2009; Schäffner, 2012; Tsai, 2010). Translation is an open concept that eludes a clean definition. It encompasses many forms of going between languages (Delabastita and Grutman, 2005; Kothari, 2016; Tymoczko, 2005). A basic definition, translation is the process of taking a source—the original written or oral language communicated by an author or speaker—and transforming it into a target—the written or spoken linguistic product. This invites examples of translation from diverse media: films (Gambier, 2016); audio books (Valdeón, 2014; Van Leeuwen, 2006); live speeches (Bassnett, 2014; Mason, 2012); and news interviews (Davier, 2014).

Notably, source has important usage in journalism—a person or thing (e.g., document) contributing first-hand information about a topic to a journalist for a news story. This can cause confusion between journalism studies and translation studies. In this paper, I reserve source in reference to its meaning in journalism, someone or thing providing information for news. Towards translation studies, I signal the presence of a text or statement meant for translation from its original language with the modifying label “source.” Target holds a particular definition in translation studies as the product—text or other media created from the translation process. I maintain this usage when discussing overlaps of translation and journalism studies. Thus, to distinguish target in journalistic translation, I focus on the published news story from the journalistic translation situation and drop the term target, referring only to the published story.

Allen (2013: 101) writes, “Translators, like authors, are the product of social structures and circumstances; translators, like authors, play a role in bolstering or challenging those structures and continually altering the linguistic and narrative tools brought to bear on them, as well as the attitudes and norms that produce them.” Journalism, like translation, is a “social practice, defined by one’s behavior” (Ostertag, 2016: 267). Journalism transfers facts and information to the written context of media, an exchange reflective of translation (Conway, 2017: 713). Translation has a stake in each part of this journalistic transfer. Information goes from source to journalist; the journalist moves that information to the written word; and the written media then transfers to audiences. If we buy the idea that at each of these translational situations, journalists simply relay information on to the next target audience through a published story, then journalism fits the early theoretical bill of translation—a linguistically equivalent communication exchange. Translation entails more than a word-for-word transfer from one language to another and includes negotiations of language with culture. Through writing, journalists balance language with culture to report information. Kothari (2016: 44) writes, “Translation is implicated in the exercise of perpetuating taxonomies, for translators draw from the available kit of equivalences.”

Journalists draw on various methods in the translation process. An example of one would be to print text spoken by a source in a non-Roman language phonetically into Romanized script with a parenthetical translation. Including or excluding the language of sources is a procedural step often dictated by news organizations, and these taxonomies can create an insider-outsider understanding for readers (Grunebaum, 2013: 168). However, news readers seldom reflect on the translation process (Gambier, 2016: 900), perhaps because news organizations rarely publish sources’ quotes as in the above method. The readers’ oblivion to the role of translation could be because a journalist engages in a level of creative translation—including oversimplification and reduction—of the cultural nuance embedded in a source’s language by erasing its existence to cater to the “common sense” audience’s experience (Hartley, 1982: 92; Conway, 2011: 152; Mason, 2012). Though institutional norms filter individuality its members can bring to the profession, according to Ostertag (2016: 265) the individual can prevail over the institution. This requires skill developed into a writing process informed by journalists’ choices and creativity.

A target, like a published news story, maintains differing degrees of what translation scholars call equivalence—how well a translation maps source language to target language—varying from semantic, one-to-one literal transformations to aesthetic, emotive renderings (Kothari, 2016). Linguistic equivalence never perfectly describes the process of source-to-target texts (Bassnett, 2014; Conway, 2017: 710; Delabastita and Grutman, 2005) but rather fluctuates between faithfulness or fidelity to the source text or to the target throughout different junctures of the translation process. Equivalence in translation is dynamic as it addresses culture and temporality, requiring a level of fidelity to either the source text, that is, formal equivalence, or the target, that is, pragmatic equivalence (Nida, 1964/2004). In some cases, as shown through critical-cultural and postcolonial translation studies (e.g., Baker, 2006), translators refuse to bridge the source text and target to challenge the content from the source text through the target. In an industry marked by principles of accuracy, transparency, and non-bias, journalism in translation from a multilingual context risks its reputation of truth-seeking and truth-telling if the translation process and the factor of equivalence is not carefully considered. If a journalist remains only faithful to their source when translating information, then they keep formal equivalence to convey important linguistic markers, discrepancies, and details; this can impact whether readers understand and accurately interpret an issue. Alternatively, fidelity only to the outcome of a published article can misconstrue the words and intentions of a source in order to make translated information through pragmatic equivalence more palatable to readers. If journalists abide by dynamic equivalence, they negotiate how honest to remain to either source language or published stories for audiences—or neither.

Expanding from this concept of fidelity—faithfulness or honesty—set forth in research on dynamic equivalence in translation, skopos theory focuses on the intention of translative action (Ehrensberger-Dow and Massey, 2013; Vermeer, 1989/2004). Of importance to skopos theory is the productive goal of doing translation; skopos, from Greek, refers to the function or aim of translation (Bazzi, 2014: 133; Vermeer, 1989/2004: 221). Skopos intersects with dynamic equivalence when the purpose of a translation runs counter to dynamism; it leans towards fidelity with either source or target. It offers agency to the translator to set independent intentions for and take liberties with the target. An important element of skopos theory recognizes that the aim of translation may shirk equivalence completely, that is, be purposely unfaithful to the source text or to the receptive understanding of a target audience (Bassnett, 2014: 6; Conway, 2017: 716).

Journalism defined by translation grapples with skopos—articulating what the aim of reporting is (Ehrensberger-Dow and Massey, 2013: 107). Formal equivalence in journalistic skopos would cater to the source, uncritically transmitting information to the target. Journalism through pragmatic equivalence would fulfill fidelity to the published story for target audiences. In reality, journalists work amidst individual, institutional, and societal pressures and vacillate between fidelity to sources and to target readers to produce writing that is “movement through language, but is also the movement itself, the process of stepping into another world” (Kothari, 2016: 44). Nodding to socio-linguistic theories applied to journalism, Conway (2015) poses a nuanced definition of the process of translation. He writes that translation is “a type of mediation or negotiation that goes beyond the rewriting of texts” (Conway, 2015: 527). This mediation has particular relevance when examining translation and the function of equivalence in media work and journalism.

Journalistic skopos

The process of journalistic translation has external factors bombarding against it from many directions. Put simply, embedded cultures and values of institutions influence journalists’ translation processes, whether through political persuasion or direct guidelines and rules (Mason, 2012; Merrill, 2012; Mufti, 2016). Organizational guidelines for translation or writing in media may come from industry associations, but in reality, tracing a coherent institutional process of writing, reporting, and translating is near impossible (Gambier, 2016: 900). If any guidance is provided, it tends to be general, leaving journalists on their own to grapple with questions of language and translation (Davier, 2014: 62). So, skopos in news translation for media organizations may exist but vaguely. Owing to a basic driver of media economics—the business of maintaining subscriptions and attracting advertisers—the skopos of journalistic translation tends to be audience-oriented (Hartley, 1982: 88). This opens space for journalists to conceptualize individual skopos and writing processes independent from institutional orders. Conway (2015: 530) writes, “When journalists decide how to render speech in another language (where ‘speech’ ranges from individual statements to entire stories), they take into consideration two sets of assumptions, those that shape how the speech circulated in the community where it originated, and those that are likely to shape it in the community that includes their audience.”

One reason journalists hesitate to embrace translation, especially when reexpressing quotes from sources, hearkens back to the idea of dynamic equivalence because it raises issues around trust and fact in an industry defined by these complex values (Conway, 2017: 723). In translation and in journalism, journalists approach words in translation to either preserve the source’s meaning or to ease comprehension and consumption of the published story by media consumers (Conway, 2015: 530). Gambier (2016: 901) finds that journalists think of translation in terms of linguistic equivalence that caters to sources by preserving their quotes verbatim and without additional clarification; the truth lies in the source and cannot be re-contextualized with information for the target audience. Yet that is not always how multilingual writing in journalism pans out. To varying degrees, journalists focus on translation in terms of both words and culture (Ehrensberger-Dow and Massey, 2013: 107). A telling study on newsrooms in Geneva—a nexus of French, German, and English—shows how word choice and cultural translation make space for journalists to creatively influence the target reading (Perrin, 2012). Perrin (2012: 135) finds that journalists engage in stancing, “the practice of taking and encoding a particular position,” when translating to infuse socio-political opinions into their writing through subtle word meanings. Stances are individualistic but heavily influenced by social standing, institutional affiliations, and other factors.

The power of journalists’ translative action lies in how important the information—as in quotes and details provided by sources and from cultural context—is to readers and how distant the source culture is from readers (Delabastita and Grutman, 2005: 19), all factors in gatekeeping and agenda-setting. Journalists’ ability to reflect on writing and contemplate the impact of translated words, or even recognize reporting’s translation situations, demonstrates discursive consciousness (Van Rooyen, 2013: 501), an indication of conscious negotiations with power (Conway, 2015: 522). The awareness of power grows with experience so that the focus and process of translation becomes more intricate beyond reflecting on linguistic translation to think about cultural translation (Ehrensberger-Dow and Massey, 2013: 119). Biesla and Bassnett (2009: 56–7) assert that journalists and editors need to be treated as experienced, seasoned translators, not only in the sense of linguistic knowledge but also literate in ethical and political dynamics of language. The denial of translation’s role in journalism leads to conflict around risk, mistranslation, cultural biases, and false equivalency (Davier, 2014: 55). Translation defined as part of skilled news writing can infuse multilingual reporting cognizant of decision-making autonomy in writing and elevate self-reflexive reporting (Gambier, 2016: 895).

While journalists may perceive news writing as simply information conveyance, the act of working with language introduces creative agency. Merrill (2004: 139–40) points out that writing and translation eliminate all previous ideas and words—to do so requires creativity. Baker (2006) explains how narratives build on one another and always include new narrative layers that rewrite or redefine something from before. Thus, the story never traverses a linear path; junctures where narratives develop and shift reveal covert ways that writers in the narrative genealogy make creative decisions about how to move it forward. In journalistic translation, the journalist does not have to adhere to just formal equivalence but can imbue stance and creativity in published stories. Even so, journalists do not have absolute authority over the ultimate meaning that arises for readers from published stories and must negotiate standards and ethics of reporting as well as authenticity to sources.

As journalists grapple with translation throughout the writing process, they cultivate varying organizational and individual practices to creatively engage multilingually. The individual process of writing in journalism fosters creative ways to achieve skopos. In some newsrooms, journalists’ skopos is to communicate through translation what is at stake in the news without providing a cultural rundown, or in-depth explanations of socio-political contexts unique and important to communities. Choosing not to engage in this aspect of translation can contribute to audiences’ semantic disconnect with critical terms that surround major political issues in multilingual nations (Davier, 2014: 64; Conway, 2011: 157). This can isolate audiences by localizing information and limiting foreign news (Davier, 2014: 66) or by propagating ambivalence, ambiguity, and stereotypes into diverse communities of public opinion (Conway, 2011: 155). In other newsrooms, translation can allow journalists to bypass conservative, suppressive gatekeepers to get information to a public (Khanjan, et al., 2013: 88). Tracing the writing process of multilingual journalists might reveal something akin to individualized skopos—aim or function—for the journalists in their reporting as they weigh information from sources and choose what to include in their published stories. Implementing creative use of language and agentive decisions in writing impacts how translation appears in news and shifts power dynamics between journalists, sources, and target readers. Creative agency gives journalists degrees of control over the direction of stories and what information to highlight. With these various ideas on individual and institutional processes and how the act of writing imbues multi-situational translation with meaning, I explore journalistic translation more concretely in Indian news through the following questions: How do Indian journalists describe their writing process? What do Indian journalists describe as individual, organizational, and social constraints that influence their translation process? What creative strategies do Indian journalists use in writing in order to fully translate different cultural meanings across languages?

Methods: data collection and analysis

This study stems from a larger ethnographic project that considered industry-level dynamics of multilingualism and postcolonial cultural translation. For this project, I centered on individual perceptions of multilingual news writing by interviewing Indian journalists about their reporting and writing processes. Chosen through purposive and snowball sampling, I amassed a list of potential journalists to interview, combing feature story bylines and asking local media researchers. After interviews, I asked individuals for contacts. In total, I conducted 14 extensive interviews and follow ups with Indian journalists, a satisfactory sample when studying individual perceptions (Middleweek, 2020; Vandenberghe, et al., 2017). The journalists interviewed worked in different contexts: 4 for magazines, 2 for newspapers, 2 with news agencies, 3 for digital outlets, and 3 through freelancing. Some answered to single editors; others pursued independent reporting and pitched to editors around the world. We met in newsrooms, coffeeshops, and homes, chosen by the journalist. I use only first names and no named affiliations even though they waved anonymity. Comments regarding rules or ethos of specific media organizations were not cross-checked with organizations’ leadership, so I keep publications anonymous.

Interviews, conducted in a semi-structured format with a polyphonic approach, ranged in time from 45 min to 2 h. Polyphonic interviewing allows each interview to stand alone to contribute a larger index of ideas rather than develop a collective interpretation of an overall phenomenon (Fontana and Frey, 2000: 657). Based on translation theories around equivalence and skopos, I incorporated broad concepts of process and creativity into my initial interview questions to elicit information about the aim and purpose of writing. Because of the semi-structured, open nature of the interviews, these questions did not remain fixed, limited, or ordered across all interviews. I allowed the journalists to speak freely in response to questions. This, in some cases, led responses towards questions I intended for later in the interview “script,” thus unnecessary to ask directly. I highlight this point to attest that no two interviews flowed exactly the same but all respondents had the opportunity to comment on the topics I put forth; however, every interview also invited unique perspectives and pathways to explore ideas around journalistic translation.

Lindlof and Taylor (2011: 246–8) encourage systematic analysis of qualitative research data, organizing data and findings through categories and codes to highlight patterns derived from existing theories or indexes or from deep readings of the data. Gubrium and Holstein (2000: 494–5) guide how to interpret and analyze data from discursive practices, which include a multitude of elements in social practice like external forces and power dynamics. These elements emerge through data and observations but have not always been anticipated in the research design as to the impact they have on findings (Bernard, 2001; Gubrium and Holstein, 2000; Spitulnik, 2009). In journalism, reporting, interviewing, and writing in multiple languages constitute several inter-related discursive practices. Following these methodological insights, this project considers external factors, mainly the relationship of language in socio-political contexts in India, that contribute to journalists’ role in translative interactions and mirrors research that asks subjects to directly confront these external forces (Ehrensberger-Dow and Perrin, 2013).

To analyze the interview data I collected, I relied on both transcripts and audio recordings to undertake multiple excavations of concepts and categories from the interviews with interlocutors. I mention the reliance on audio because often in the analysis process, researchers turn to the text from the interview speech to provide analytical data. As will become apparent later, I grappled with a similar challenge that many of the journalists articulated—recognizing the tone and context in which thoughts were conveyed to me, part of the broader discursive practice. In the initial sweep of the data, I intentionally coded for the concepts of process and creativity, tags that at times intertwined. I revisited the data to make note of interesting details shared about translation and the role of multilingualism in the journalists’ work. Through repeated visits to the interviews—via reading transcripts and listening to audio—I recognized patterns across the interviews, as well as unique practices and experiences, that elucidated individual, organizational, and social constraints that influence journalists’ translation processes.

Findings and discussion

The journalistic writing process is broadly defined to explore if journalists apply something akin to skopos—the aim of rendering language in translation—as they report. Through processes, they weigh information from sources and choose what to present to audiences in published stories. With a range of experiences in different media, regions, and languages, journalists in this study wrestled with multilingual India and their place in it. The Indian journalists revealed how they initiated skopos with the source, skopos with the story, and creative agency to go between. In the interview stage, how journalists approached their sources and whether they chose to record their interviews informed how they expressed skopos to remain faithful to the words of sources. The writing stage was influenced by the interview process in terms of how honestly journalists could render sources’ words and culture for audiences to understand, which shifted fidelity to the published stories. Creative agency, initially downplayed by journalists as a perk of literary writing, actually garnered opportunities for them to maneuver between honesty to sources and honesty to stories.

Skopos with sources: Reporting on or off the record

When asked to describe a process, some journalists offered great detail, from developing story ideas to balancing reporting budgets. For others, it garnered uncomfortable stirs that led to admissions of ad hoc processes, letting what flowed flow. Even though the Indian journalists often overlooked multilingual activity embedded in interviews, when reflecting concretely on their reporting processes, they expressed ways that interviews and standards of recording impacted what they understood to be the purpose of reporting. They gave potent reflections on their journalistic skopos and the responsibility they take when writing between Hindi, English, or other Indian languages.

Journalists often mentioned interviews as part of their process, but only as a quick step before moving on to talk about other aspects of reporting. Interviews were described as part of information gathering, the interactions journalists had with sources inherently necessary and standard in reporting. However, when asked about writing and incorporating quotes, the journalists articulated more detail about how they approached sources and what these interactions entailed. Some journalists worked alongside local translators in the same language to build credibility and trust within rural communities. Others navigated reporting fields solo with variable language skills. When asked about hiring translators or working in areas where Hindi was less common, Neha, an independent journalist who pitched stories to multiple publications, remarked, “I work better if I know the language myself,” and sometimes if she felt uncertain about information passed to her by a local translator, she made sure to clearly state that in her writing, that someone had translated on another person’s behalf.

The manner and context of the interviews influenced the degree to which journalists could establish skopos in the direction of their sources, depending on their ability to comfortably interact and then accurately recall source statements. The actual language of interviews impacted the notion of fidelity to sources. To stay honest to a person interviewed, Neha allowed the source to speak in the language in which they felt most at ease. She usually assumed that to be Hindi based on the regions she reported from, so she approached her interlocutors thusly unless they were politicians, who she addressed first in English and switched if an official wanted. For some of the Delhi-based journalists like Ipsita, their beat affected whether they interacted directly with sources. A reporter and section editor for an online news portal, Ipsita reported on several major conflict zones, often from her desk in Delhi. She relied on local contacts to collect and translate information for her. Ipsita sometimes never encountered local languages herself. “I do wonder with some people how faithfully it is being translated,” Ipsita admitted, but she recognized the importance of telling these stories from regions in peril, even without verbatim quotes. Vishnu, a full-time desk translator for a magazine working to convert its English-language feature archive into Hindi, worried about his involvement in the multi-situational translation process from Hindi to English back to Hindi. He aimed to minimize the filters through which the original language of a quote would pass. “If the recording is in Hindi and he has translated that in English, it is good for me if I get that original recording instead of translating again,” Vishnu explained. He noted that if the author had quoted a source in an article, he could try to access audio from interviews on file or, if the author was willing, could discuss notes and feedback to reconstruct quotes as close to original statements as possible. If he could at least preserve some aspect of the original Hindi from the interview, he felt he would honestly convey the source. All the choices involved in whether to conduct interviews in multilingual reporting on or off a recorded record impact a later part of the reporting process, as introduced by the challenges faced by Ipsita and Vishnu—at the site of the writing desk. Beyond simply preserving the words of sources through audio recording, the way that journalists recorded their source quotes impacted how to translate quotes into writing.

Journalists led me through multiple models of working multilingually and revealed arenas of “freedom,” often based on organizational affiliation, in how journalists document their sources in multiple languages. Some news organizations maintained stringent control over the interview process and required full transcripts, mainly as a safeguard from accusations of false claims. Ipsita noted that her assigned regional beat dictated her use of a recorder. For security reasons in the conflict zones Ipsita covered, she did not carry one, but that also meant that without recordings she could not verify quotes or ask other speakers to translate what sources said. She relied heavily on her notes—she took notes in English, writing down either the translation or paraphrasing from a contact or context. In other words, quotes were rarely fully recorded in their original form. Other publications gave complete freedom to writers on whether or not they record, transcribe, or take notes during interviews; this meant journalists owed minimal accountability to the veracity of their sources’ verbatim claims. Neha, the independent journalist, rarely recorded interviews in the field with local people. She believed that brandishing a recorder gave her power she did not want to wield over sources. Recording equipment lent an air of authority to the journalists that might compel local people, not officials or politicians who accepted press interactions as part of their roles, to agree to an interview out of respect to someone they perceived of higher status. However, in high-profile stories she investigated, she followed the advice of editors and produced recordings and transcripts to protect herself and the organizations from potential retaliation.

Some journalists swore by recording their interviews, even if just for back up. Independent journalist Ankita worried about what might get lost or miscommunicated during an interview, so she always listened back to verify and transcribe quotes she used. Although she did not fully transcribe her interviews, she felt that between a recording and her own experience on the ground, she could understand the gist of most expressions. A journalist working for a major news service, Priyanka transcribed everything even if it added significant time to her process. She stopped taking notes as much during an interview because she believed it distracted her source and stilted their interactions. Technology and better phone recorders played the biggest part in her shift to relying so closely on recordings. She almost always used two recorders, from a personal and a business phone. Recordings helped Ankita and Priyanka be more present in their interactions so that they could experience subtler modes of communication, but ultimately, they would translate the words from the recording in order to adhere to sources’ meaning.

The process of recording quotes revealed different ways that journalists perceived the importance of verbatim source text. These journalists saw their interactions with people as part of a textual record they created in reporting. The journalists were aware that to include the words of another person in their stories meant that they would translate their interaction to readers. The skopos, aim, of their reporting process tipped the journalists’ fidelity more toward their sources. While what they communicated about their sources’ experiences and culture was directed at the readers, their fidelity sat more with sources who did not have their own means to communicate their story to wider audiences. These journalists recognized that their stories may represent some first draft of history for the communities they cover. They were aware that translation through journalistic writing offered space to amplify unheard voices. However, when not recording or relying on hand-written notes, journalists took oral histories from sources without considering that they could also document original accounts from the source text. With recordings, journalists could truly engage with both linguistic and dynamic equivalences as they turned their sources’ words into textual targets and thus fulfilled the skopos of fidelity towards their sources.

Skopos with the story: Newswriting in translation

If a journalist did not record interviews and took notes in a different language from the source, a quote might never be reproduced verbatim in its original language. A translated quote was never truly a verbatim quote anyway. Journalists could write source information directly into the target language of a publication without reference and context to the source language. In these circumstances, journalists inadvertently acculturated their sources. “How often we miss out on what people have said because we do not bother to use their words in our story,” Supriya, an editor and journalist, bemoaned. Individual choices in interviews and institutional requirements influenced how journalists could approach skopos towards the published story. Depending on the language of the interview and the recording of the conversation, the journalists could access source language to varying degrees in order to translate it into a published story for a target audience.

Priyanka lamented the erasure of source language in lots of reporting. Under the title of bilingual reporter with the news service, Priyanka had to produce multilingual editions of all her stories, in Hindi and English. This provided her the means to communicate source language to a readership, even if not the target-language audience. Prior to her current position, Priyanka translated much of her own work and posted it online. She understood that if someone else translated her story and the quotes she included, she had no control over how they might “turn around words to demean.” Priyanka connected fidelity to her sources in providing both source- and target-language editions of her stories to her own reputation as a journalist. She remarked, “At the end of the day, it is your byline; your credibility is at stake.” Ankita, without an organizational affiliation, noted her attempts to translate her writing. She at times pitched to Hindi-language outlets but otherwise posted independently on online channels. “For my own sake, I want to find the time to translate my own pieces in Hindi because, I mean, I am doing rural reporting, and the people I am writing about would be able to read it if it is in Hindi, and many more people would be able to read it if I also write in Hindi.” An interesting aspect of the independent work Priyanka and Ankita do in translating English-language articles to Hindi relates to Vishnu’s concern about the multi-situational translation process, again from Hindi to English back to Hindi. For Priyanka and Ankita, when the story had to be translated from English to Hindi, if they had the recorded quotes from their sources, they could render them verbatim into a Hindi-language story. They expressed skopos as an equilibrium between publishing a story with translated information and preserving the words and cultural nuances from sources.

Some media organizations set rules on how to include translated text. Some allowed journalists to include quotes in two languages, but more often, word limits constrained the inclusion of source language in translated quotes. Ankita noted that when she wrote for an international source, some particularly cultural words, like panchayat (a village governance system in India), needed to remain in Hindi but would be foreign to readers. She had to eat up words explaining what it meant. “I do wish that some of the direct quotes could come in,” she said. “Sometimes I actually, if there is a line or two, I let it be in Hindi, and then I put the meaning in brackets.” Ipsita remarked, “One word local sometimes requires 10 words English to make it clear.” She wanted the weight of Urdu–Hindi words to come through in writing but knew that by translating and paraphrasing, the emotional power of some words lost their heft. She recalled times in which she did include original language in her reports, like the term zulm, an Urdu–Hindi word for injustice or oppression but that in Kashmir held a deeper meaning of “discontent that bleeds into everything.” Ipsita here reveals dynamics reminiscent of those in critical-cultural studies of translation. As postcolonial scholars stress, including the “foreign,” or marginalized and subaltern languages and texts, builds the presence and legitimacy of the source. By including zulm, Ipsita gave recognition to the unique culture of a community for the target audience to learn about, understand, and hopefully accept. This sort of emotion in published stories, whether in the same language or not, could offer audiences new perspectives into a community and increase their acceptance of everyday multilingual exchanges (Davier, 2019: 202).

The rhythm of speech tells about the culture of the source as well. Rhythmic sentences and vivid descriptors might signal a culture of poetry (written or oral) that a community maintained and valued. This type of speech required a dynamic adherence to the source’s speech and language even when rendered into translated quotes in a published story. Supriya recalled writing a major feature series on India’s 2014 national election for an online publication. She used a dialogue format that allowed her to include long quotes in the original language with the translated quote published beside it. “Conversation was a big part of the story,” she explained. “Let people have their say in their words.” Supriya and her editors understood that more than language was conveyed in conversations. The way people interacted, from the length of responses to the titles they used with one another, spoke volumes about a place. To Supriya, a quote “should sound distinct from the rest of the piece.” Years later, the executive editor of the publication had limited the use of other languages in publication. Supriya, now an editor, said that they expected writers to “translate someone in a way that is easy for the reader to understand, but you should also not lose sight of what that person would have liked to say.” In this, the organization had set the skopos to cater to the target-language audience. Even so, Supriya felt that journalists should retain the rhythm of speech in translation that reflected original statements. As an editor, she could tell when a journalist took liberties to translate a quote, remarking, “You can tell a quote very much sounds like the writer; it reflects their own grammar.” She wanted writers to respect the source text and translate more than just the language of a quote by engaging in dynamic equivalence to better match the source for the audience to learn to understand marginalized communities.

For most of the journalists, elements of speech like rhythm were key to maintain honesty with sources in their writing; these elements showed unique features and creative means of social expression. In the journalists’ writing for news, they recognized that norms like brevity and fact needed to be part of their writing. However, brevity endangered their ability to include some factual statements—for example, verbatim quotes—from their sources. Journalists worried about what would get lost when they translated quotes. Even though sources might never know how their quotes were translated, the journalists struggled with their role to mediate sources and their communities in a target form to readers. They had to judge what words to translate, what words resonated from sources, and what readers of a different language might not understand. Journalists noted elements of their writing that could influence meaning for target audiences. These were creative junctures in their stories, but the journalists struggled with the degree of creative license they exercised over the information while still maintaining honesty to sources.

Creative agency to go between in journalistic translation

While the journalists recognized the need to convey truth and stay honest to the words of sources, they also found ways to bring creativity into their writing. After all, they entered journalism to tell stories and to write. The journalists referred to the literary merit of the translation process and acknowledged that some styles of journalism could not engage with language in a literary vein. But in making a distinction between literary and journalistic writing, they insinuated that the pressures of news writing could not address the same concerns of deliberative synthesis and creativity that literary writing did. “Journalists do not get the luxury to think like a literary writer does,” one editor stated. Despite the opinion that they did not write the same way as literary authors, most of the journalists pursued reporting as storytellers, looking for unique angles or creative ways to write the stories they investigate. Although some journalists initially waved aside the focus of writing in translation, they easily articulated particular responsibilities they had when working between English and Hindi, namely, the responsibility to remain “honest.” Honesty reflected the idea of fidelity—to sources, readers, or stories—echoing dynamic equivalence and skopos.

In going-between languages, some of the journalists reflected how working in translation allowed them to try new writing styles. Ankita found that even though she could easily go-between when gathering information, when it came to writing in English from Hindi-spoken interviews, there was a disconnect. She began to insert herself more directly and to include translators or local contacts more in her writing to symbolize to readers the separation that language created for everyone involved in the multi-situational translation process. Ankita’s reflexivity actually highlighted the skopos of her reporting directly to readers—that such perspective might influence how people thought about and aligned with issues. This urged all parties involved in the multi-situational process—source, translator, and reader—to reflect on their position in relation to the story. She found that reflexivity in her journalistic writing helped her think through the imbalances of power lurking between her and the sources. In a similar way to Supriya’s reflection on preserving the rhythm of speech in dialogue, Ankita felt that if she could not reproduce the language verbatim, she could at least document other elements from her perspective to create vivid scenes from sights, sounds, and smells at a location of the source interaction that provided context and represented the culture in translation.

The style and reputation of publications could limit the degree of freedom that journalists had to creatively explore language in writing. Vishnu noted how important style was to maintain credibility with readers of the magazine, but doing so in Hindi took creative finesse:

“[The magazine] has a certain set of writing articles which is not common in news magazines because it’s, again, not completely news, that is political and cultural. And the style is very different from what I have seen in Indian English media. They follow certain literature style — more complicated. Compound sentences are there, which is not in other English media… In Hindi, it is preferred not to write in compound sentences. You have to be honest to that. That honesty, I try to maintain so that it looks like you are not reading a random other magazine or newspaper. It should be like you are reading actually [the magazine] in Hindi.”

In this Vishnu felt an allegiance to the target audience, to give them a reading experience that catered to their tastes. Yet, because Vishnu worked as a desk translator, he approached his writing less as a journalist in the reporting process and more as a literary writer. He relied on the first target (English) author to help try in the second target (Hindi) to maintain honesty to what actually happened at the source. He explained, “When I am translating, I want my reader to actually sense what [the source] was going through when he was, he was speaking to [the journalist]. So I wanted to give that. I always want to give that to my readers, that it is not some… they can feel actually what, what the character or the person in the news is trying to say.” While Vishnu initially attributed fidelity to the publication, he oscillated between adhering to the publication’s style while preserving an honest experience of the source interaction.

As the journalists engaged with creativity in their processes, a shift appeared related to the skopos and fidelity of reporting. While the skopos to communicate the stories of their sources to wider audiences still applied, the fidelity that journalists expressed in regards to their writing wavered between honesty towards their sources and towards the readers of the published stories. For example, Ipsita spoke about developing her language ability to be able to engage in longer conversations with sources and to notice the nuance of expression herself. “I would love to bring out particularities in language in my writing—the flavor of a language,” she mused, fluidly incorporating the aim to capture her sources’ language and culture to give an honest impression to her readers. The journalists interacted with communities that in some ways they identified with through language, but more critically they were “othered” from. They wanted to take their audience there with them so that readers could reflect on the differences in the experience. “You are taking the reader into a world,” one journalist reflected. These were crucial interactions to the journalists that helped them rethink their own position in Indian society, and if journalists could recreate this for readers, they too might have a change in perspective. If they could not offer readers the language of the source, they could find creative ways to translate and transport their readers in time and space. Fidelity did not lie so easily in one or the other realm but rather flowed between the sources and readers.

Conclusion

As seen through the critical eyes of Indian journalists, language in news writing can be dynamic. Infusing creative elements to stories that bypassed the limitations of translation allowed journalists to feel more honest to both sources and target audiences. A process of reporting and writing was not necessarily organized, clean, or coherent, but processes related to multi-situational translation helped them navigate the contours of multilingual journalism. News organizations limited the way that journalists could have languages interact on the page, so they relished creative opportunities to give true glimpses of language and culture from the places they reported.

The exchange of language between a source and a journalist resonates with power. Journalists have agency to provide space for others’ voices in news writing or to transform language from sources to fit political agendas. Whereas in the literary sense, faithfulness can refer to language and tone of artistry from one text to the next, in journalism honesty to the source more acutely refers to both verbatim quotation of sources and the tone of meaning within quotes. The verbatim-ness, the actual expressed words, of a quote signals honesty; to convert these words into another meaning delicately skirts truth, not always for malicious intent, but nonetheless altered. Sources’ words are not truly from the source when translated and can be engraved with unintended truth. This research suggests a larger theoretical implication—that truth and honesty in journalistic translation needs to incorporate and invite the multiplicity of linguistic voices that protects fidelity to sources. Recognizing the asset that multilingualism can offer to a plurality of voices in news processes, this study echoes Ruigrok’s (2010) call for a journalism of accountability by focusing on what individual journalists do in translational moments and how the industry equips (or not) journalists to amplify multilingual perspectives.

This project has attempted to contribute a single thread in a global network of languages with a 1000+ thread count. Calling it one small thread is not to minimize how Indian journalists contribute unique insight about multilingual news reporting processes. Scholars have found that journalists in new democracies—India’s is considered young at under a century old—have significant influence on setting journalism norms as institutional and societal shifts still challenge democratic values. By developing both unique, individual practices and some standards in global media networks, local media in young democracies support the democratic, deliberative development of audiences (Fair, 2013; Rao, 2009; Voltmer and Wasserman, 2014). Thus, the Indian journalist, in traversing multiple spheres of contact in reporting, has a unique position to communicate across complexly diverse populations. The field of mass communication needs to treat India, South Asia, and the Global South not as blips in the academic library but as stalwart regions to conduct research on global information flows.

Inevitably, this study has gaps in theoretical approach and methodology. Even as this research calls for attention paid to the role of meso- and micro-level media systems in the Global South, studies of a single region limit the scope of findings and risk invisibility—that scholars might fail to see broader threads that inform research and practices. For example, a project based in India focusing on Hindi-English allows two domineering languages among over 20 official and hundreds of other languages to dominate the discussion. India’s varied multilingual news ecologies are ripe for future studies of journalistic translation. These could consider reporting procedures—like seeking consent from sources to render quotes into other languages—or professional ethics in multilingual newsrooms—the notions of neutrality and objectivity as shortsighted of the realities of social encounters in multilingual societies.

The hope is that research on creative flows in journalism incorporates multilingual writing to invite new ideas about journalistic translation. Diving deeper into the ethics of language use in Indian news can invite a reimagining of how multiple languages incorporate into news. Global journalism networks could make room for multilingual content and lessen the global dominance of English information. If journalism worldwide embraces multilingualism in news writing, even if it makes readers uncomfortable with untranslated words, it might also urge readers to reconsider their identities and positions in relation to linguistic and cultural others (Davier, 2019: 202). Perhaps a more multilingual global audience could grow out of the inclusion and confluence of languages in all language presses.