Scammell, Claire (2018): Translation Strategies in Global News. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 103 p.

In her new book, Scammell explores the potential of a “foreignized” approach to the translation of global news. The term foreignised is a deliberate variation on foreignisation, the opposing strategy to domestication in literary translation, proposed by Venuti (1995: 24; 2008: 19). This play on terms is meant to convey that, in the news translation context, a so-called foreignised approach is only foreignising to a degree, which is to say only in certain defined respects, namely quotation and culture-specific concepts (p. 3). Scammell argues that a foreignized approach in the translation of global news constitutes a “practical alternative” (p. 3) to the current practice of domestication, just as she claims that a “[…] new relevance for ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’ in the news translation context is found by drawing on Venuti’s terms as two ends of a scale rather than as binary opposites” (p. 43). What is the nature of translation strategies in global news? What are the translation norms for global news translation? What is a foreignized approach in the news translation context? Translation Strategies in Global News provides a detailed answer to these questions. Global news, or rather, the international communication of news, crosses national boundaries and are intercultural in nature. The translation of global news plays a vital role in the communication of news in the age of globalisation. The role of journalists is, as Roberto A. Valdeón states, one in which “[j]ournalists perform a ‘two-fold mediating role,’ and primarily their role is to communicate news events to their audience, but this often involves translation” (Valdeón 2007: 100). The first stage of mediation, common to all newswriting, is the stage during which the journalist decides what information to include and what information to leave out through adding, deletion, replacing, omission, and the like. The second stage of mediation occurs when interlingual translation, which crosses language and culture, is involved. However, the role of translation in news communication is, as Valdeón (2012: 851; 2015: 634) argues, “inadequately addressed.” Before exploring this book, it is necessary to revisit Bielsa and Bassnett’ s Translation in Global News, published in 2009. The dominant strategy in news translation, as they maintain, is absolute domestication: “As material is shaped in order to be consumed by the target audience, it has to be tailored to suit their need and expectations” (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009: 10). In response to their call for research into translation strategies for news, which is relatively underdeveloped (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009: 10), Scammell’s book provides a comprehensive account of translation strategies in global news. The eight-chapter book comprises an important introduction, a conclusion, and six numbered chapters dealing with six different aspects of the issue. The introduction begins by briefly describing the case study of a news event, “What Mr. Sarkozy Said in the Suburbs in 2005,” and how the former French President’s comments were reported in the British press, with a view to presenting the domesticating norm for news translation and to introducing a certain degree of “foreignised” approach. The introductory section specifies a case study from the British news agency Reuters and presents a corpus of five English-language Reuters news reports related to “What Mr. Sarkozy Said in the Suburbs.” Chapter 2, entitled “The Global News Agency,” covers the role of the “Big Three” global agencies—Reuters, Agence France Presse (AFP), and Associated Press (AP). Section One highlights the role of “news wholesalers” played by the “Big Three” (p. 8). The dominance of the “Big Three” is attributable to two factors: the demise of original foreign news reporting in the British press and the development of online news …