Translation in global news

Abstract

Esperança Bielsa, lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Leicester, and Susan Bassnett, professor in the Center for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick, have written a fascinating book about the translation that occurs or does not occur within the world's largest international news agencies, such as Reuters, the Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press and the Inter Press Service. In actual fact, these journalists make adaptations of texts written in other languages, leaving out parts of the original, adding sentences of their own creation, changing the angle of the news, making contextualization, and adding their own perspective, always with the desire to make the final version easily understood by its target audience. [...]an Arab reporter working on the war front in Iraq will telephone a bilingual colleague in a news agency office in Baghdad who will translate (or adapt) his account into English, and the English version will be sent around the world to local offices of the news agency which will undertake the translation (or adaptation) of the English text into the local languages.

Esperança Bielsa and Susan Bassnett. 2009. Translation in global news. London and New York: Routledge. 162 pp.

Esperança Bielsa, lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Leicester, and Susan Bassnett, professor in the Center for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick, have written a fascinating book about the translation that occurs or does not occur within the world's largest international news agencies, such as Reuters, the Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press and the Inter Press Service. The most startling revelation that the book offers, and which is repeated time and again, is that these agencies do not use the work of professional translators and that this task is assumed by international journalists who do not like to be reminded that they do what translators are expected to do.

In actual fact, these journalists make adaptations of texts written in other languages, leaving out parts of the original, adding sentences of their own creation, changing the angle of the news, making contextualization, and adding their own perspective, always with the desire to make the final version easily understood by its target audience. This approach is called "absolute domestication" (p. 10). To give a crass example, if the original news article, printed in an Arab newspaper, referred to Israeli soldiers who shot women and children in Gaza as "terrorists," this epithet would be deleted in the version adapted for a North American audience. The whole purpose of such adaptations is to avoid shocking the readers of the new text by presenting them with ideas and images that do not conform to their own habitual way of seeing the world. This raises the serious philosophical question of the ethical implications of distorting what was originally said just to make it sellable. This substitution of real translation by politically and commercially motivated adaptations leads to the conclusion of this thought-provoking book: "What the study of global news translation does, therefore, is to make us all more aware of the manipulative processes that underlie what we read and to raise serious questions about the extent to which we can ever know what was or what was not said in another cultural context" (p. 132).

The book contains a brief history of the globalization of media and the rise of the world's leading news agencies. It also compares the differences of journalistic styles in major European and North American countries and demonstrates how the American approach to writing news articles has influenced Europeans. Likewise, it discusses the impact of the latest technological innovations on the instantaneous spread of news around the world. Indeed, it is partly due to the need to produce news articles as fast as possible that journalists do not take the time to make translations loyal to the original text but choose instead the speedier alternative of making their own adaptations. As with the rest of international exchanges, English is becoming more and more the only truly international language of journalism. For example, an Arab reporter working on the war front in Iraq will telephone a bilingual colleague in a news agency office in Baghdad who will translate (or adapt) his account into English, and the English version will be sent around the world to local offices of the news agency which will undertake the translation (or adaptation) of the English text into the local languages.

Two academic exercises contribute greatly to the book's depth and make its principal claims all the more credible. The first one is the two-week period of "ethnographic observation" (p. 74) that one or both of the authors spent in the Montevideo headquarters of the Agence France-Presse and the Inter Press Service. Among the differences noted between the two news agencies is the fact that the Inter Press Service takes four times longer than the Agence France- Presse to make a translation (or adaptation) because it tries to be more loyal to the original version. Both agencies hire journalists from different countries of Latin America in order to make certain that the articles that it writes are free of dialectal idiosyncrasies. At the Agence France-Presse office, English is replacing French as the major language of communication among employees.

The other academic event recorded in detail and presented in the appendix is an international symposium on "the role of globalization, linguistic difference and translation in the production of news" (p. 133), which was held at the University of Warwick in April 2004. Some of the participants of the conference regret the lack of real translators in contemporary international journalism as they fear that objectivity is being sacrificed for the sake of lucre.

There are at least eighteen spelling and grammatical errors in this short book, five in English, eight in French, three in Spanish and two in Italian, which is surprising for a book written by people working with languages.

I recommend this book especially to journalists and students of journalism, and secondarily to translators and students of translation.