In the area of linguistics, for instance, we could ask how journalists negotiate relationships of power by observing their language use at a discursive or pragmatic level, rather than a syntactic level, thus linking concerns of linguistics with those of political economy. Second, this table describes what has been done, not what could be done. Recent work (e.g., Bielsa & Bassnett, 2009) frequently stands in dialectical tension with earlier work sometimes it even draws the very premises of the approach upon which it builds into question. Furthermore, these categories are not internally consistent. The studies I cite use these ideas, but few fall exclusively into one category. In other words, these distinctions are heuristic. I am imposing distinctions that scholars do not respect in practice (why should they?) my point is not to classify individual works as such but the ideas that underpin them. I follow Carey ( 1988) here when he says, ‘the purpose of representation is to express not the possible complexity of things but their simplicity’ (p. Instead, it is a view from above – a conceptual map – and it makes the compromise every map makes: it reveals broad patterns, but it sacrifices fine-grain details. First, it puts approaches in distinct boxes and appears to suggest the lines between them are clear. If they are a leg, trunk, and tail, then a materialist approach reveals how they fit together to produce an elephant.īut this table requires two preliminary notes. The three approaches that have characterized news translation research all reveal different facets of this tension. We find culture – the set of shared assumptions that structure how members of a community make sense of the world – in the tension between the political economic, social, and subjective worlds. (3) As acting subjects, we shape the economic, political, and social worlds. (2) The social world gives structure to our subjective worlds. This approach begins with three assumptions: (1) The political and economic worlds give structure to the social. I contend that an approach drawn from materialist philosophies of language, such as in Vološinov’s ( 1929/ 1986) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, offers a necessary perspective by describing the dynamic system in which the other approaches take part. In contrast to them, I focus squarely on culture. Schäffner ( 2012), for her part, asks whether we need new concepts (such as ‘transediting’) to describe the work journalists do, or whether ‘translation’ already encompasses the editorial roles they play. For instance, van Doorslaer ( 2010a, 2010b) asserts that our interest in news has extended the possibilities of the modes and degrees of translation by moving beyond commonsense notions of interlinguistic transfer and troubling notions of source and target texts.
1 (We cannot see metaphorical elephants from all angles at once any more than real elephants!) Of course, the study of news translation has matured to the point that there have been other attempts to do this. What I want to do here is try to describe the elephant itself, at least from one angle. And the cultural studies or sociological approach asks how journalists understand their role in society.īut they are like the blind men describing parts of the same elephant. The linguistic approach asks how journalists handle lexical or stylistic concerns. The political economic approach, as I see it, asks how and where news travels. Each responds to a different set of questions, and each relies on different ideas about culture, news, and translation. In the past four decades, I contend, three approaches have characterized the study of news translation. Often with news translation, there is no source text, as we have long understood the concept. ‘News’ raises questions of genre – are we concerned with hard news? Soft news or human-interest stories? Analysis of current events? Opinion? ‘Translation’ is no better. ‘Culture’, as Williams ( 1983) famously observed, is one of the most complicated words in the English language.
What is the role of culture in news translation? I ask the question simply, but it is not a simple question. Introduction: culture and news translation
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