Article body

1. Introduction

Journalistic translation is a subdomain of the field of Translation Studies (van Doorslaer 2007). A comparatively young subfield, it has established its grounding and has attracted increasing academic attention over the past two decades. Several studies during that time period have provided a top-down qualitative analysis and systematic review of the research in the field of journalistic translation (for example Conway 2015a; Schäffner 2018; Davier, Schäffner, et al. 2018; Valdeón 2015; 2020). However, few studies have provided a quantitative and statistical account of the research in the field. This study addresses this gap by providing a bibliometric study of Journalistic Translation Research (JTR) as an alternative interpretation to the two decades of research in journalistic translation. There are three primary aims of this study: (1) to unravel prominent features of bibliometric information; (2) to investigate the most discussed topics and areas of focus; and (3) to examine the prominent methodological approaches adopted in JTR over the past two decades. This article adopts the use of journalistic translation as the name of the subfield rather than news translation because it is not just concerned with the specific genre of print newspapers and news websites but also includes other journalistic genres such as periodicals, TV and radio broadcasting. In addition, it adopts translation research as an umbrella term which encompasses both translation and interpreting studies.

The study covers a span of two decades since it is generally believed that journalistic translation has developed into a subfield within Translation Studies since the mid-2000s (McLaughlin 2015; Valdeón 2015). This paper aims to examine JTR by combining a bottom-up quantitative method with qualitative analysis because, as van Doorslaer (2015: 172) acknowledges, one of the limitations of bibliometric methods is that “the focus on the quantitative data inevitably runs the risk of overshadowing qualitative peculiarities or nuances.” This study comprises a corpus-based bibliometric analysis. First, it gives a quantitative account of the research and then it explains these results with reference to qualitative analysis.

The next section gives a brief overview of bibliometric studies in Translation Studies. Section 3 describes the data and methodology used for this study. The findings of the bibliometric study of JTR in the Translation Studies Bibliography (TSB) are presented after that, with Section 4 analyzing the bibliometric data of JTR from several perspectives. Sections 5 and 6 examine the research topics and methodological approaches in JTR respectively.

2. Bibliometric studies in Translation Studies

The methods of bibliometrics have been applied by researchers to analyze academic publications for several decades. They were first developed in the social sciences, later adopted in the humanities and subsequently used by translation scholars to map “knowledge structuring” (van Doorslaer 2014: 22) in the field of Translation Studies. Despite their common usage, various terms have been used by translation scholars to describe bibliometric methods, the most common of which are bibliometrics, scientometrics and bibliographies. These terms are often used interchangeably without precision. Scientometrics is defined as “the study of information and publications in their social, economic, and political settings” (van Doorslaer and Gambier 2015: 306), while bibliometrics is used to refer to “the study of the production, dissemination, and use of scientific publications and communications, based mainly on textual parameters” (van Doorslaer and Gambier 2015: 306). In this paper, the term bibliometrics will be used to describe both the biographical and textual data of publications.

Bibliometrics have been applied by translation and interpreting scholars to give a comprehensive overview of the diachronic development of the whole discipline (Gile 2015; Zanettin, Saldanha, et al. 2015). Several studies have used bibliometric data to examine translation or interpreting studies in specific countries or regions, such as Grbić and Pöllabauer’s (2008) scientometric study of research on community interpreting in German-speaking countries, Rovira-Esteva and Orero’s (2011) contrastive analysis of research assessment in translation and interpreting in Spain, and Wang’s (2015) bibliometric study of interpreting research in China. Previous studies have also explored those translation studies which adopted a particular approach, for instance, Zhang, Pan, et al.’s (2015) bibliometric survey of journal articles which focused on a discourse analysis approach to Translation Studies. A number of studies have used quantitative data to analyze a subfield of TS, including interpreting studies (Pöchhacker 1995), conference interpreting research (Gile 2000), community interpreting (Grbić and Pöllabauer 2008), non-professional interpreting (Martínez-Gómez 2015), and medical translation and interpreting (Aixelá 2010). These studies show the benefits of bibliometric methods and provide significant insights into the diachronic development of these subfields of TS.

To date, bibliometrics have not been used to analyze JTR, except for one study in Chinese. Zheng (2020) employed CiteSpace,[1] a visualization software package, to conduct a comparative bibliometric analysis of English and Chinese journal articles on journalistic translation. The articles were published between 2000 and 2018 and were taken from the Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Science Citation Index databases on the Web of Science[2] as well as from the core journal database of China National Knowledge Infrastructure.[3] However, the study did not take into account journals which are not indexed in these major databases or other publication types which might contain JTR, and publications in languages other than English and Chinese were not included. As van Doorslaer (2015: 170) points out, “T&I [Translation and Interpreting] journals are only very partially represented in the main citation indexes.” Thus, it is better to use one of the main online bibliographies, such as the Translation Studies Bibliography. This study aims to provide a comprehensive account of JTR in various publication types in several languages from the TSB. The next section describes the corpus and methods used in this study.

3. Corpus data and methodology

The Translation Studies Bibliography (Gambier and van Doorslaer 2013) is a comprehensive online database developed by John Benjamins Publishing Company, containing all major publications in translation and interpreting studies. It includes a wide variety of journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, conference proceedings, theses/dissertations, edited volumes and monographs, with annual updates of bibliographical materials. In 2015, it merged with Translation Studies Abstracts,[4] another major bibliography in TS, which was originally developed by St. Jerome.

A search for titles containing “news” in all fields in the TSB generated 429 results from between 2000 and 2019.[5] A query of “news” was searched in all fields because the search deliberately included a comprehensive list of publications with a focus on journalistic translation. A thorough manual check on each entry was conducted afterwards to screen out book reviews and any publications which have nothing to do with translation and journalism or only a tangential relationship to the topic. Each entry provides bibliographical information regarding author/editor, title, year, pages, publication type, language, journal/publisher, keywords and abstract. All these entries are written in English even if the publication is in another language. The abstracts are based on information contributed by a particular author or various other sources, including journal/book abstracts if it is a journal article or book chapter.

A corpus of 396 abstracts on journalistic translation from the TSB was compiled on Sketch Engine,[6] an online corpus software package. The general information from the TSB corpus is presented in Table 1. Each English abstract contains an average of nearly five (4.8) sentences with just over 30 (30.7) words per sentence. The metadata of each abstract, including author/editor, year of publication, language, publication type and keywords, are annotated to each document according to the information provided by the TSB.

Table 1

General information from the TSB corpus

General information from the TSB corpus

-> See the list of tables

The corpus-based bibliometric analysis of the entries contains both quantitative and qualitative methods, as follows: (1) it starts with a quantitative calculation of the metadata of annotated entries in the TSB from the perspectives of year, author/editor, journal/publisher, publication type and language; (2) it then examines the research topics of the JTR by looking at the keywords provided in the entries in the TSB as well as at keywords and high-frequency nouns extracted from the abstracts as a result of a corpus analysis of these abstracts using Sketch Engine; (3) finally, it explores the keywords list, including the term approach in the TSB and the diachronic patterns concerning different approaches employed by researchers to studying journalistic translation.

This study compares the keywords given by the TSB with the keywords, both single words and multi-words, generated in a corpus analysis. The keyword system in the TSB provides a reliable indication of the research topics and areas of focus in the field. As van Doorslaer (2005) notes: “[t]he quantitative analysis of these key words and their thematic fields indicate the priorities in the dissemination of TS [Translation Studies] research.” In corpus linguistics, the term keyword has a slightly different meaning, as it refers to words which “occur statistically more often” than to those in a reference corpus (Baker 2006: 125, emphasis in original). English Web 2015 (enTenTen15),[7] a corpus consisting of 15 billion words of texts from the internet, was chosen as the reference corpus for the corpus analysis. A qualitative analysis of the abstracts was conducted after the quantitative analyses of these annotated entries.

4. Bibliometric analysis of the TSB

This section examines publications in the field of journalistic translation across various countries/geographical regions in different languages by employing the bibliometrics of the TSB.

4.1. Year and number of publications

Figure 1 shows the number of annual publications on journalistic translation in the TSB between 2000 and 2019. At the start of the millennium, there were around 15 publications on journalistic translation in the TSB annually. Journalistic translation attracted its first wave of scholarly attention in 2005. After that, it first saw a downward curve before triggering a massive wave of publications, which peaked in 2010 with 41 publications. The number halved before bouncing to its third peak in 2012. During the two decades, the number of publications on journalistic translation in the TSB fell to its lowest levels in 2004 and 2013 respectively, with nine publications published yearly. From 2015 onwards, annual publications of JTR in the TSB have stabilized at around 20 publications.

Figure 1

Number of publications on journalistic translation in the TSB between 2000 and 2019

Number of publications on journalistic translation in the TSB between 2000 and 2019

-> See the list of figures

4.2. Authors and editors

The top 20 scholars who authored or edited the highest number of publications in JTR are presented in Figure 2. It can be seen from this figure that Roberto A. Valdeón is the most prolific author/editor in JTR. He has contributed 21 publications over the last two decades, almost twice as many as either María José Hernández Guerrero or Christina Schäffner, who tied for second place. Kyle Conway ranked fourth in authoring and editing with 10 publications. Other prominent scholars in journalistic translation, listed in rank order or alphabetically by their surnames in the case of those with the same number of contributions, are Ali Darwish, Lucile Davier, Claire Tsai, Susan Bassnett, Esperança Bielsa, Luc van Doorslaer, Kristina Károly, Li Pan, Maria Cristina Caimotto, Ya-mei Chen, Yves Gambier, Sue-Ann Harding, Ji-Hae Kang, Han-Sik Kim, Eva Samaniego Fernández and Marlie van Rooyen.

Figure 2

Number of publications on journalistic translation by authors/editors in the TSB between 2000 and 2019

Number of publications on journalistic translation by authors/editors in the TSB between 2000 and 2019

-> See the list of figures

4.3. Publisher and journals

Figure 3 presents the top publishers publishing JTR over the past two decades. Routledge, John Benjamins and Cambridge Scholars Publishing are the three biggest publishers of JTR. Conference proceedings resulting from the Translation in Global News conference (Conway and Bassnett 2006) were published by the University of Warwick. Other publishing houses which published edited volumes or monographs on journalistic translation are Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Rodopi, Universidad de Oviedo, St. Jerome and Bloomsbury Publishing. Apart from monographs, these publishers also published several edited volumes which include articles on journalistic translation, including La traducción periodística [Translation in the Press] (Cortés Zaborras and Hernández Guerrero 2005), Political Discourse, Media and Translation (Schäffner and Bassnett 2010) and Translating Information (Valdeón 2010).

Figure 3

Number of publications on journalistic translation by publisher between 2000 and 2019

Number of publications on journalistic translation by publisher between 2000 and 2019

-> See the list of figures

As is shown in Figure 4, Meta and Perspectives published the highest number of journal articles on journalistic translation in the past two decades. Babel, Journal of Interpretation & Translation Research and Target also published a dozen or more research articles on this subject. The other journals in which JTR is published are Across Languages and Cultures, Translation and Interpreting Studies, The Translator, Sendebar, Language & Intercultural Communication, Translation Watch Quarterly, Trans, Tradução e Comunicação, Machine Translation, Forum, Translation Journal, Quaderns, Puentes and Interpreting. Among these, five special issues of journals on journalistic translation were published, namely Language and Intercultural Communication 5(2) in 2005, Across Languages and Cultures 11(2) in 2010 and 19(2) in 2018, Meta 57(4) in 2012, and Perspectives 23(4) in 2015.

Figure 4

Number of journal articles on journalistic translation by journal between 2000 and 2019

Number of journal articles on journalistic translation by journal between 2000 and 2019

-> See the list of figures

4.4. Publication type

The types of publications in which JTR is embodied in the TSB are shown in Figure 5. Over four-fifths of JTR is published in the form of journal articles (319; 81%). JTR is also published in book chapters (29; 7%), monographs (23; 6%) and edited volumes (21; 5%). Only four dissertations/theses (1%) on journalistic translation were included in the database for the 20 years studied.

Figure 5

Types of publications on journalistic translation in the TSB between 2000 and 2019

Types of publications on journalistic translation in the TSB between 2000 and 2019

-> See the list of figures

4.5. Language of publication

JTR was published in a range of languages between 2000 and 2019, as can be seen in Figure 6. English remains the most dominant language in which JTR is published. Almost three-quarters of all publications (288; 73%) on JTR in the past two decades were published in English. Spanish (54; 14%) is the second most used language, followed by French (18; 5%), Portuguese (11; 3%) and German (7; 2%). A small amount of JTR, which is included in the TSB, was in other languages: Arabic (4), Italian (3), Russian (3), Catalan (2), Chinese (2), Finnish (1), Swedish (1), Turkish (1) and Ukrainian (1).

Figure 6

Languages of publications on journalistic translation between 2000 and 2019

Languages of publications on journalistic translation between 2000 and 2019

-> See the list of figures

The bibliometric analyses of scholarly publications on journalistic translation in the TSB provide a general overview of the annual publications in this field. However, they do not specify the research topics and methodologies of these studies, which will be analyzed in the following sections.

5. Corpus analysis of abstracts

This section gives a detailed account of the topics and areas of focus of JTR over the past two decades. It first explores the most frequent keywords from the entries on journalistic translation provided by the TSB, and then analyzes the high-frequency words and keywords of the publications’ abstracts through the use of corpus analysis tools. Finally, it compares the keywords generated by the TSB with those of the corpus analysis to see if there are any similarities and differences.

5.1. Keywords of the entries in the TSB

Table 2 presents the top 20 keywords found in the publication entries on journalistic translation in the TSB and their frequencies. Undoubtedly, “press=journalistic writing=journalism=news” remains the top keyword, occurring in 338 entries (85.35%). As a specific form of media translation, journalistic translation was associated with media/multimedia translation in 46 entries (11.62%). Apart from the printed press, news media on the internet and on television were the focus of attention in 19 studies (4.8%) each. As the object of study, ideology is the third most frequent keyword, appearing in 35 entries (8.84%). This accords with Valdeón’s (2015: 647) observation that “[i]deology has remained at the basis of many of these [product-based] studies.” Discourse analysis, or critical discourse analysis to be more precise, was adopted in 25 studies (6.31%). Translations of political discourse or economic/finance/business discourse appeared in 34 and 15 studies respectively. Twenty-four textual studies (6.06%) explored specific translation strategies or the procedure through which journalistic translation is produced. The keyword “corpus=corpora” appeared in 21 entries (5.3%), which thus identified those studies that adopted a corpus linguistics approach or used a corpus to describe an electronic pile of news texts. Nearly a tenth (33; 8.33%) of the JTR focused on cultural aspects or adopted a cultural approach to the study of journalistic translation. These studies go beyond the textual level and probe into the socio-political context of journalistic translation, resulting in keywords such as “context=socio-political context” and “globalization=globalization=internationalization.” Some of the journalistic research (19; 4.8%) is of a comparative or contrastive nature in that it compares source texts with target texts or translated news texts produced by different media outlets. Journalistic translators and the role of the translators in the procedure of news production was discussed in 14 studies (3.54%).

Table 2

Top 20 keywords of annotated entries on journalistic translation from the TSB between 2000 and 2019

Top 20 keywords of annotated entries on journalistic translation from the TSB between 2000 and 2019

-> See the list of tables

5.2. High-frequency nouns in the TSB corpus

Keywords provided in the entries in the TSB provide some indication of prominent trends in the JTR over the past two decades. However, this list of keywords may not provide the whole picture as regards dominant research topics and areas of focus in the literature. This subsection moves on to describe in greater detail the results from the corpus analysis. The most frequently used nouns and their frequencies in the TSB corpus are shown in Table 3. Although several words, such as translation, news, translator, analysis, medium (media), role, corpus, press and strategy, are in common with the keywords provided by the TSB, the frequency list also includes several nouns that are not in the TSB but are frequent in the corpus. Some of these nouns are related to the language features of journal abstracts, such as study, article, paper, author and research. A few words, such as text, language, source and target, are associated with TS. Two other nouns, newspaper and process, are linked with the topics and areas of focus of the JTR. The word newspaper occurs 177 times in the corpus, which illustrates that newspapers, both print and online, are still the dominant media format from which journalistic translation is studied. A concordance search of process shows that this noun co-occurs with translation in 24 out of 120 instances (20%). This demonstrates that the process-oriented translation research of news production has received some, but not much, attention in JTR.

Table 3

Top 20 nouns in the TSB corpus

Top 20 nouns in the TSB corpus

-> See the list of tables

5.3. Keyword analysis of the TSB corpus

A more detailed account of keywords is given in this subsection. Table 4 illustrates both single-word and multi-word keywords in the TSB corpus. Their frequency in the corpus and keyness score are also provided. It can be seen from the left-hand side of the table that some of the single-word keywords are in common with the keywords provided by the TSB, including translation, journalistic, translator and corpus. However, the keyword list also provides more keywords which are not included in the keywords provided by the TSB but are prevalent in the corpus. It shows that El País and El Mundo, the two largest Spanish newspapers, were the source of information for a number of studies. The word transediting, a term coined by Stetting (1989), appeared 19 times in the TSB corpus, but did not occur in the reference corpus. The lexical, linguistic and discursive aspects of journalistic translation have received much scholarly attention. Journalistic translation is also studied alongside interpreting, resulting in the 69 instances of interpreter in the corpus. The concept of habitus, originally from sociology, occurs 10 times, illustrating an innovative approach of JTR from a sociological perspective.

As for multi-words in the corpus analysis, it can be seen that, in JTR, scholars use news translation (95) almost seven times more frequently than journalistic translation (14). The pair of source text (29) and target text (26) was often used together in the comparative analysis. The role played by translation in news production and translation process occurred 18 and 17 times respectively. As a dominant language in the mainstream media, English news (14) is often compared with the news in another language, one of which is Chinese news (10). Scholarly attention is focused on international news (19) or global news (9) in the JTR. It is interesting to note that news texts, as a common genre of texts, are used to test the validity and accuracy in several studies on machine translation (12), though studies employing a parallel corpus (8) of original and translated news texts are still rare in JTR.

Table 4

Top 20 single-word and multi-word keywords in the TSB corpus

Top 20 single-word and multi-word keywords in the TSB corpus

-> See the list of tables

This section has provided a brief summary of the research topics in the field of journalistic translation over the past two decades, through the analysis of the top keywords in the TSB as well as high-frequency nouns and keywords, using corpus analysis tools. A more in-depth review of the main methodological approaches adopted in JTR will be elaborated in the next section.

6. Key approaches to journalistic translation research in the TSB

The use of multiple approaches and methods in JTR reflects recent academic interests in journalistic translations. Table 5 shows the keywords involving “approach” in the TSB corpus. Their frequencies are provided in the right-hand column. Overall, cultural and sociological approaches are the most popular approaches in JTR, and these account for a total of 45 publications (11.36%). Literary and historical approaches are each adopted in eight publications. The linguistic approach is represented in seven works, followed by functionalist, ethnographic, pragmatic and political approaches. Two publications employ each of sociolinguistic, descriptive, cognitive, philosophical and economic approaches. The following subsections give a brief account of several prominent approaches.

Table 5

Keywords containing “approach” in the TSB

Keywords containing “approach” in the TSB

-> See the list of tables

6.1. Cultural and sociological approaches

The cultural approach has been one of the most popular approaches adopted by scholars in JTR this millennium (for example Bielsa and Bassnett 2009; Schäffner 2010; Maitland 2015). It saw its peak in 2015 with a special issue of Perspectives on “Culture and news translation” (Conway 2015b). Conway (2006) proposes a cultural approach to journalistic translation. His approach addresses the significance of the translator/journalist in a broader social and cultural context, as he considers journalistic translation to be a form of cultural translation by which “journalists try to explain to one group how another sees the world” (Conway 2012: 998). Likewise, Davier (2015), using a corpus of translated news reports from 2007 to 2010 regarding the minaret ban in Switzerland, proposes a methodological triangulation of cultural, ethnographic and linguistic approaches in a study on how multicultural readers of Agence France-Presse and Agence Télégraphique Suisse understand Switzerland as the cultural other.

The sociological approach examines the social contexts of journalistic translation. Its emergence as a research method for journalistic translation started with two articles on the interplay of journalistic translation and sociology in the conference proceedings of the 2006 Translation in Global News conference (Caimotto 2006; Hautanen 2006). Since then, the approach has been applied to a number of JTR studies (for example Bielsa 2010a; Harding 2012; van Rooyen 2013). In a special issue devoted to applying sociology to translation studies, Bielsa (2010a: 155) argues that “a sociological input to the study of both literary and news translation reveals important aspects of the social context in which translation occurs.” Following this trend, Harding (2012) combines narratological and sociological approaches and analyzes how three pairs of Russian and English news narratives on the 2004 Beslan hostage crisis from three websites – Caucasian Knot[8], Kavkaz Center[9] and RIA-Novosti[10] – contributed to their (re)construction of social reality. In a similar vein, van Rooyen (2013) draws on concepts from social theory, such as structure and agency/agent, to study the translation practices of radio news at the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

6.2. Literary and historical approaches

Literary and historical approaches tied for the third most used approach in the TSB corpus. A survey of abstracts indicates that the literary approach is not used to study news texts per se but rather translated literary texts which are published in newspapers or magazines. Likewise, the historical approach is employed to explore translations in journalistic publications in a certain historical time period. For example, Bastin and Iturriza (2008) give a historical account of the role played by translation in the Venezuelan press between 1808 and 1822; van Doorslaer (2010) conducts a comparative study of the translations of serial stories in Flemish newspapers from 1844 to 1899; and Valdeón (2012) carries out a historical review of translation in journalism and discusses the role played by translations in news production and transmission during different periods since the 17th century. These studies are representative examples in JTR which employ a historical approach and discuss the critical role played by translation in the history of journalism.

6.3. Linguistic and functionalist approaches

Journalistic translation has often been studied from a linguistic perspective. Early journalistic translation scholars mainly employed a linguistic approach in the study of journalistic translation. Analysis of journalistic translation has made use of a wide variety of linguistic approaches, such as textual analysis and critical discourse analysis, as well as corpus and narrative analysis. The application of these approaches to journalistic translation has yielded fruitful discussions, alternative insights and further advances in journalistic translation studies.

Early research on journalistic translation mainly adopts a textual approach to examining translated news texts as final products. Most studies have been restricted to limited comparisons of original texts and their translations, typically revealing the differences in their structures or meanings (for example Hursti 2001; Rasul 2019). These studies highlight the potential need to study journalistic translation from a linguistic perspective. However, the linguistic approach is narrow in scope and focus, dealing only with lexical, syntactic and grammatical differences between the source texts and the target texts, with little attention being paid to other factors that may influence translation practice in the journalistic production process.

The functionalist approach examines and explains the journalistic translation process beyond the textual level. The translator’s political position, cultural orientation and ideology will affect the selection of source texts, as well as the translation strategies and methods used, which in turn will determine to a great extent the final product of news translation. These factors affecting news translation are explained in a number of studies carried out to explore these issues. For instance, drawing on Nord’s (1991/2005) functionalist model, van Rooyen and Naudé (2009) explore how news reports originally produced for print media by the South African Press Association are transedited into radio news from English to Afrikaans by OFM, a regional radio station in South Africa, in such a way as to suit its audience.

6.4. Ethnographic and other approaches

Compared with an overwhelming majority of research on journalistic translation as final products, there have been relatively few studies that investigate the actual procedures of journalistic translation within news institutions. The ethnographic approach has gained prominence in JTR since 2010. This approach is mainly used to conduct participant- and context-oriented research of journalistic translation through the use of methods such as observation, interviews and surveys with translators and/or journalists at particular news agencies (for example Bielsa 2010b; Tsai 2010; Davier 2015; 2017).

Translation plays a critical role in news production (Valdeón 2012). The institutional role of journalists/translators has been explored in a number of ethnographic studies (for example Bielsa 2010b; Tsai 2010). Several studies have examined other roles inherent within the news production process (Davier 2015; 2017). The procedure of journalistic translation was investigated through ethnographic fieldwork at national and international news agencies, such as Reuters, Associated Press, Agence Télégraphique Suisse and Agence France-Presse (for example Bielsa 2007; Davier 2015; 2017). The researchers observed that translation plays an indispensable role right from the beginning of the news production procedure, although it is often carried out by journalists instead of translators.

Overall, these studies of both institutional roles and workflows highlight the need for ethnographic research within a particular news outlet as it provides essential insights into the journalistic translation process. Apart from the approaches mentioned above, the JTR in the TSB has adopted other approaches, such as the political approach (van Doorslaer 2009; Lovett 2019), pragmatic approach (Bazzi 2014; Károly 2017), cognitive approach (Ehrensberger-Dow and Perrin 2015), descriptive approach (Hernández Guerrero 2012), economic approach (Cronin 2005) and philosophical approach (Conway 2015a).

7. Conclusion

This study aims to sketch out the field of JTR over the past two decades. It achieves this through a corpus-based bibliometric study of the entries from the TSB. The bibliometric analyses of publications show that journalistic translation received increasing attention by scholars, although it fluctuated and peaked around 2010. The majority of prolific authors and editors of these publications are based in Europe, although there are a few in the Asia-Pacific region. This result is consistent with what Valdeón (2015) notes; namely, that Europe is still at the forefront of JTR, although an increasing number of researchers from the Asia-Pacific region have contributed to this research area. Most of the edited volumes and monographs in this field are published by prestigious publishers, including Routledge, John Benjamins and Cambridge Scholars Publishing. In terms of journal publications, Meta and Perspectives have published the highest number of journal articles on journalistic translation. Journal articles predominate research outputs in this field. As a lingua franca of international publications, English remains the predominant language of these publications, followed by a number of European languages such as Spanish, French and German, with only a small number of non-European languages. This finding broadly supports other bibliometric studies in Translation Studies (Zanettin, Saldanha, et al. 2015). A possible reason for this might be that the TSB is a bibliography developed and maintained by European scholars and institutions.

The second major finding was that JTR covers a variety of topics and areas of focus. Through a quantitative analysis of keywords in the TSB, the study found that JTR focuses on news from multimedia platforms in the era of convergence (Davier and Conway 2019), including newspapers, television and the internet. Ideological issues of journalistic translation received much scholarly attention, as these are often studied in relation to the critical discourse analysis of political and economic discourses. Cultural issues have also received much attention. Translation strategies have been the focus of a number of linguistic studies. Corpus analysis of both high-frequency nouns and single-word and multi-word keywords complements the research findings, which suggest that process-oriented research exploring the translator’s role is scarce in JTR. Much scholarly attention in the JTR has been devoted to translations of journalistic texts, whereas relatively little attention has been given to journalistic interpreting.

The study gives a brief overview of the main approaches adopted in the field of journalistic translation over the past two decades as seen from the keywords in the TSB. It found that cultural and social approaches are dominant approaches adopted by scholars, followed by a range of other approaches, including literary, historical, linguistic, functionalist and ethnographic ones. This finding suggests that JTR has moved beyond the textual level and has entered into the socio-cultural aspects of journalistic translation. Previous studies in journalistic translation often classify the literature in this subfield into three main categories based on linguistic practices, institutional routines and socio-cultural contexts (Valdeón 2015; Conway 2015a; Schäffner 2018). However, this taxonomy is not always stable, and Conway (2015a) points out that the classification of these three categories of approaches is misleading because they are not always consistent, and because a study may not fall into one single category but rather be a hybrid of several approaches. These results partially corroborate Zheng (2020), who found that research foci of international JTR include discourse, ideology, cultural diversity, news media and new media, whereas Chinese domestic research focuses on translation methods and strategies.

The findings generated from this study point to several future trends in JTR. As many scholars in journalistic translation have pointed out, linguistic analysis alone cannot paint a full picture of how news texts come into being, so they suggest a multidisciplinary study of journalistic translation in addition to the linguistic approach (for example Davier and van Doorslaer 2018; Davier, Schäffner, et al. 2018). A comprehensive approach that combines all these three approaches (the political economic approach, the linguistic approach and the cultural studies or sociological approach, in Conway’s terminologies) is a materialist approach proposed by Conway (2015a). Linguistic analysis of news texts could lead to the identification of translation strategies, which are determined by institutional practices, policies and values. Studies into journalistic translation would be more comprehensive if they combined textual analysis with ethnographic fieldwork aimed at investigating institutional practices and policies (Davier and van Doorslaer 2018; Davier, Schäffner, et al. 2018).

The data of this study is limited to the entries on journalistic translation in the TSB. Van Doorslaer (2015: 172) warns us against “the risk of non-representativeness in any corpus created for bibliometric research.” Although the TSB corpus tries to address the issue of comprehensiveness, it is inevitable that certain language, approaches or research types may be over or underrepresented. As the bibliometric analysis of the JTR shows, journal articles may be overrepresented whereas Ph.D. theses are underrepresented in the TSB. Just as Zanettin, Saldanha, et al. (2015: 163) point out that “TSA [Translation Studies Abstracts] is essentially an Anglophone database,” the JTR in English might be foregrounded in the TSB, with other languages being much less represented. The research in Chinese has almost been left unnoticed under the Anglophone dominance of English publications in the TSB; indeed, there are only two journal articles in Chinese, including two studies (Li 2001; Cheng 2002) exploring the translation of international news from English to Chinese in Hong Kong.

The findings of this study have a number of practical implications for future research. This study mainly focuses on the textual information of bibliometric information. Further research could usefully consider citation analysis to explore the network of literature. The TSB mostly indexes Translation Studies journals, but does not include all the articles on journalistic translation. Although a few other neighbouring disciplines are included, there are few journals from the field of media and communications. For example, communication journals such as Journalism and Journalism Studies are now publishing on journalistic translation. Gile (2020: 3) observes that “bibliometric studies that only explore translation journals would probably miss a substantial part of CIR [Conference Interpreting Research] production.” Although Gile (2020) is referring to conference interpreting research, this applies to other subfields in Translation Studies as well. Future research needs to be conducted in order to explore the field from a wider variety of journals.