Presentation

This special issue of Meta is devoted to an area of research that has been burgeoning over the past decade, news translation. Although news production is historically linked to translation, researchers had not paid much attention to the connection between these two linguistic and cultural processes until very recently. In 2009, though, two books brought this area to the fore: they delved into the intricacies of news writing from a TS perspective. M. José Hernández Guerrero published her Traducción y periodismo, a highly informative introduction to translation and journalism in Spain that can be applied to other languages and contexts, whereas Esperanza Bielsa and Susan Bassnett authored Translation and Global News, an enlightening sociological study of translation in news agencies. Additionally, in 2010 the edited collection Translating Information gathered articles by Yves Gambier, Henrik Gottlieb, Esperanza Bielsa, M. José Hernández Guerrero, and Ovidi Carbonell among others. My introductory paper of this special issue of Meta highlights the role of translation in the early years of journalism in Europe. War news was the staple diet of the time, and much of the information came from Central Europe. News was produced in the Low Countries, Germany and France and then transported to and translated in peripheral countries such as England, Spain and Denmark. Translation was soon recognized as a vital part of the profession, but the translational activity remained secondary in most respects, perhaps because the linguistic and cultural transformations of news texts continue to be to a large extent obscure. In the next paper, Christina Schäffner, who has worked largely on translation and ideology, assesses the relevance of a term introduced in the 1980s to refer to news translation: transediting. Schäffner contends that, in spite of the popularity of the word, there is no reason to support its use at a time when most researchers defy the traditional concept of translation and support a more anti-essentialist view of what translating means. The following articles exemplify a variety of approaches to the analysis of news translation. Krisztina Károly starts with a corpus-based study of Hungarian-English texts. Although corpus-driven research is well established in TS, this is probably the first time that it is applied to news translation. The reason for this lack of corpus-based studies of translated news may lie in the fact that, given the peculiarities of news texts, it is a difficult task to gather corpora of one type or another: very often the researcher is unable to locate the source texts upon which news writers base their material. Karoly has used Topical Structure Analysis and Event Structure Model to assess topical shifts in the Hungarian versions of English texts. Shifts of politically-laden terms form the basis of Alev Bulut’s paper. Buluv focuses on the translation of controversial terms in the Turkish context and, more specifically, of zenci and negro. Bulut studies the potential conflict arising from the use of inadequate choices and suggests the need to analyze the role of the interpreter of political texts. Georgios Floros, who also looks at the debates concerning the traditional view of translation, connects it to concepts used in Communication Studies such as gatekeeping. Particularly relevant in his paper is the issue of translation ethics, which he studies within the Cypriot context. Floros acknowledges that news translation poses many challenges for the writer, the researcher and the audience, but also stresses that the primacy of news production norms over translational norms is not always beneficial for the readership and suggests taking into account the latter in order to improve the credibility of the final product and avoid ethical violations. …