Translation in Global News

Esperanca Bielsa, Susan Bassnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134130238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

The mass media are of paramount importance in the formulation and transmission of messages about key developments of global significance, such as terrorism and the war in Iraq, yet the key mediating role of translation in the reception of speeches and addresses of figures like Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein has remained largely invisible.

Incorporating the results of extensive fieldwork in key global news organizations such as Reuters, Agence France Press and Inter Press Service, this book addresses central issues relating to the new pressures on translation arising from globalization, analyzing new texts from major news agencies as well as alternative media organizations. Co-written by Susan Bassnett, a leading figure in the field of translation studies, this book presents close readings of different English versions of key Arabic texts circulated in Western media to demonstrate the ways in which a cultural and religious 'Other' is framed in different media.

1 Power, language and translation

Translation in the twenty-first century

The emergence of translation studies as a distinctive field of research has had considerable impact across a number of disciplines since its early tentative beginnings in the late 1970s. Opinion is divided as to whether or not translation studies can be classified as a discipline in its own right, and the term ‘interdiscipline’ is probably the most favoured term at present (Snell-Hornby et al., 1994). But regardless of debates about the name and nature of the subject area, what is clear is that discussion of translation has grown steadily in importance since then and has become significant in a wide variety of fields, from literary studies to post-colonial studies, from socio-linguistics to discourse theory, from business studies to international relations and globalization studies. Understanding something of what happens when translation takes place has come to be seen as necessary and important.

Translation as a metaphor for intercultural exchange serves also as a key image for the start of the twenty-first century, a century that is already one of massive movement of peoples around the planet on an unprecedented scale. Millions of people are displaced, some by wars and repressive governments, others by failed harvests, famine and economic catastrophe of one kind and another. Millions have left their homelands, abandoning their culture and language and seeking to start a new life in another place. In such circumstances, there is a heightened awareness of cultural difference and a greater need to reach out across cultural and linguistic boundaries than there has ever been before. This is reflected increasingly in literature, and many of the great writers of our age have changed languages, crossed borders and experimented with the unfamiliar: writers such as Vladmir Nabokov, Josef Brodsky, Milan Kundera, Samuel Beckett and Carlos Fuentes, and literary theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Tsvetan Todorov follow on from James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, and find themselves anew by translating themselves through the use of other languages. The pain of exile can result in extraordinary creativity, and is also a means of writing differently, because exiles, like translators view their world from more than one perspective.

When the history of the twenty-first century is written, attention will be drawn to the great rift that opened up between the Christian and Islamic worlds, resulting in the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, the war in Iraq and the renewal of savage fighting in Afghanistan. Time and again commentators in the media have raised questions about misunderstanding between peoples, about misinterpretation, in short, about mistranslation. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a call went out to universities and translation bureaus across the United States trying to track down anyone who might have some knowledge of some of the languages used in Afghanistan and the surrounding areas. Since the start of the conflict, hundreds of young soldiers have died, uncounted numbers of civilians and many translators and interpreters.

At times of conflict, the role of the translator who produces either written or verbal versions of what is said in another language becomes foregrounded and deeply ambiguous. The task of a translator is to render what is said or written in one language into another, but where there is a highly charged situation that task is extremely difficult. Reliance on the competence of a translator involves trust, trust that he or she will adequately render the message originating elsewhere. Both parties, speaker and hearer, are dependent on the skills and good faith of the translator, and nowhere more so than in a war zone.

In the Middle Ages, when heralds brought news from the battlefield back to the prince controlling the conflict, there were occasions when they were punished by mutilation or even death for being the bearers of unwanted news. Some translators have suffered similar fates, and international organizations such as Reporters Without Borders regularly update the list of journalists, including translators and support staff, killed and imprisoned in trouble spots around the world. Bearing messages from the other side is fraught with danger and often translators risk their lives for the job they do. Some sixty Iraqi interpreters working for the British in Iraq have been murdered since the start of the conflict, and in August 2007 The Times ran a front-page story on the plight of ninety-one Iraqi interpreters and their families who, the story claimed, have been abandoned by the British government, in contrast with the special arrangements made by Denmark to protect its interpreters, with asylum as an option.

The ambiguities of translation

The role of the translator has been, and still is, burdened with suspicion and anxiety, for it is the translator who brings across the unfamiliar, who mediates between cultures that may well be violently antagonistic to one another and perhaps have a long history of misunderstanding between them. Translating therefore requires very special skills that go far beyond the linguistic. Just understanding what words might mean in the abstract is not enough; the translator needs to grasp what the words can signify in each particular context and then has to try and render those additional layers of meaning. Not for nothing has it been said that the primary task of the translator is to translate not what is there but what is not there, to translate the implicit and the assumed, the blank spaces between words. The difficulty of doing this effectively is immense.

The history of the discovery of the Americas by Europeans and subsequent establishment of colonial settlements is also a history of translation. Interestingly, key figures in the mythologizing of early colonialism were women: Pocahontas in the north, La Malinche in the south. La Malinche in particular has aroused strong views: on the one hand, she is seen as a vital instrument in the establishment of a relationship between the Spanish under Cortés and the native American population; on the other hand, she is seen as a traitor, as a betrayer of her own people, a woman whose linguistic fluency assisted a process of colonialization and enslavement. La Malinche in many respects symbolizes the ambiguous position of the translator, a figure who mediates between worlds, whose loyalties are to both the originator of the message and its destinee. The verdict on La Malinche remains two-sided: she can be seen as a heroine or as a betrayer, just as an armed guerrilla can be seen as a freedom fighter by one group and as a terrorist by another.

The role of the translator similarly can be seen from a dual perspective: on the one hand, the translator makes communication between cultures possible, enables people with no access to the language of another people to open up a dialogue. On the other hand, the translator may collude in a process that either establishes or reinforces an unequal power relationship between peoples. Post-colonial scholars such as Tejaswini Niranjana and Vicente Rafael have highlighted ways in which translation was used as an instrument of oppression, either by reducing native culture to an accessible object or by inscribing and reinforcing the colonizers’ perspective of that culture (Niranjana, 1992; Rafael, 1988). Though, ideally, translation can open up a new channel of communication between cultures, it can also reinforce the status quo and effectively restrict the import of new ideas, new literary forms and anything that contradicts the established perception of the target language audience.

It is, of course, a fact that not all languages and cultures have, or are perceived as having, equal power and status. The very terminology of ‘minority’ languages, for example, already implies an inequality. Some languages have assumed greater significance than others, through political, economic and even geographical factors. The history of colonialism is an extreme example of unequal power relations between languages, but languages have held greater or lesser status for centuries. Latin was the high-status language of Europe until the late Renaissance, for example, when gradually vernacular languages rose in prestige and came to acquire even greater cultural capital from the eighteenth century onwards. It should always be remembered, therefore, that an act of translation is not a process that takes place on a horizontal axis, but rather on a vertical axis, with one language, either the source or target, in a superior position to the other. Inevitably, this affects how translation takes place because the strategies employed by the translator will vary.

The basic activity of translation involves a translator taking a text, either written or oral, and changing it into another language. In doing this, there are all kinds of constraints, most obvious of which is the linguistic. Put at its simplest, no two languages are ever sufficiently alike for the identical structures and vocabulary to be used to express the same thing. Geographical proximity, relationships between languages, close links between societies do not ensure identical linguistic structures. Edward Sapir’s statement about linguistic difference is as valid today as it was when he first wrote it in 1956: ‘No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached’ (Sapir, 1956: 69).

This means, of course, that a translator has to work within the constraints of the two languages, which may be considerably different from one another. Take, for example, politeness conventions operating in a northern European language and in Japanese. Forms of address vary enormously according to criteria of social status, age, gender and familiarity, and to make a mistake could cause embarrassment at best, offence at worst. Or consider the vast difference in rhetorical conventions between French public speaking and English, where the former draws upon a sophisticated set of discursive norms, while the latter taps into a vein of irony and possibly also a powerful vein of religious allusion that can be traced back to the seventeenth century.

Summarizing the complex operation that is translation in their book on translation and power relations, Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler write:

Translation thus is not simply an act of faithful reproduction but, rather, a deliberate and conscious act of selection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication – and even, in some cases, of falsification, refusal of information, counterfeiting, and the creation of secret codes. In these ways translators, as much as creative writers and politicians, participate in the powerful acts that create knowledge and shape culture.

(Tymoczko and Gentzler, 2002: xxi)

Translation therefore involves negotiation, it involves conscious selection and it involves re-creation in the target language. Tymoczko and Gentzler also suggest that there are times when translation may also involve more sinister forms of textual manipulation that they term falsification and refusal of information. What they mean is that a translator can add to a text or, perhaps a more frequent act, leave out parts of it. Translators can, and often do, expand a text with explicatory details, or delete those parts which are deemed too unfamiliar and inaccessible to a target audience. The strategy of omission, which is extremely common, effectively prevents target readers from ever having full access to the source. Tymoczko and Gentzler see this as almost a form of censorship, and indeed research into the history of translation of repressive regimes such as fascist Italy or Spain in the 1930s does indeed show that omission was a deliberate strategy directly linked to centralized censorship. However, it is important to note that omission is a key strategy in the translation of news items, where material is tailored to the needs of a specific local audience. As will be discussed later in this book, the translation of news items can involve all kinds of textual manipulation, including synthesis, omission, explication and a host of other textual strategies.

Early translation studies research in the 1970s wrestled not so much with manipulation, but with the problem of defining and determining equivalence. Could a translation be said to be equivalent to the source text in every way, and if not, why not? Eugene Nida explored the problem by establishing a distinction between what he called formal and dynamic equivalence, a binary distinction that can be traced back to the Romans and the categorization of translation as either word-for-word or sense-for-sense. Hence formal or word-for-word translation adheres more closely to the structures of the source, while dynamic or sense-for-sense translation abandons formal equivalence for a more broad-ranging view, and rejects any notion of equivalence as sameness.

In the 1980s Katharina Reiss and Hans Vermeer developed their skopos theory, which postulated that the objective of the target text would determine how it was translated. This meant that a translation could deviate enormously from the source and yet fulfil the original purpose. Vermeer’s theories have therefore been extensively used in discussion of technical translation and reception and are particularly helpful for any discussion of news translation. Underpinning skopos theory is the idea of equivalent effect, rather than of any binary equivalence on the linguistic level. Hence the translation of an instruction manual, for example, should adhere to the norms and conventions appropriate to the target audience, rather than following the codes of the source text, which may lead to a wide divergence in semantic, syntactical and even broader cultural terms and, as a result, obscure meaning. We have all seen menus or hotel instructions or similar texts that have been translated literally, with no regard for the conventions of the target readers and so appear absurd. Equivalent effect is probably the best one can hope for with most translations, when we reflect that what happens in translation is that a text is read, decoded and then reshaped in the target language to accommodate differences of structure, style, context and audience expectation.

The cultural turn

As translation studies began to develop out of linguistics and literary criticism, questions of power relations began to play an increasingly significant role. The so-called cultural turn in translation studies back in the early 1990s ensured that translation would henceforth be seen not as an isolated activity, taking place in a kind of vacuum, but as an act directly linked to the world in which translators work. The cultural turn stressed the need to take into account the circumstances in which translation occurs, broadening the object of study from the purely textual and taking into account both source and target contexts. Itamar Even-Zohar elaborated a cultural model based on a study of translation history that showed how translation varied at different moments: a culture actively seeking to renew itself, even one that perceived itself in the grip of nationalistic fervour, would translate more texts than a culture which saw itself as culturally self-sufficient (Even-Zohar, 1990). So, for example, during the nineteenth century in the period of revolutionary ferment as countries across Europe demanded independence from the Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires there was a huge surge of translating activity which fed into the emerging new national literary movements. At the same time, as Britain and the United States consolidated their global economic power, so translation activity slowed down and became, as it is today, marginal and not necessary either to the state or to literature. The present translation boom in China, however, offers an example of a nation in a period of radical change and expansion, importing as much as it can from elsewhere.

Even-Zohar’s cultural hypothesis was followed by research that looked more closely at the strategies used by translators themselves. Lawrence Venuti elaborated a dichotomy originally formulated by the German Romantic scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1813, who suggested that translators are faced with the choice of either taking the reader back to the text or bringing that text across to the readers (Schleiermacher in Schulte and Biguenet, 1992). When the first option is followed, features of the source text and its context are reproduced with the result that the final product might seem strange and unfamiliar, and this process has come to be known as foreignization. This form of translation deliberately foregrounds the cultural other, so that the translated text can never be presumed to have originated in the target language. In contrast, when a text is adapted to suit the norms of the target culture, this is known as domestication, since signs of its original foreignness are erased. Venuti prefers the term acculturation rather than domestication, and draws attention to the ideological implications of transforming the foreign into something that has lost all sense of its foreignness, which he sees as problematic, since by erasing traces of the foreign, the translator prioritizes the needs and expectations of the target culture over the source. Venuti argues that this practice has been at the heart of imperialist translating strategies and proposes what he calls ‘dissident’ translation practice, in which the foreign is deliberately not erased, so as to compel target readers to acknowledge the otherness of the source: ‘Foreignizing translation is a dissident cultural practice, maintaining a refusal of the dominant… [it] enacts an ethnocentric appropriation of the foreign text by enlisting it in a domestic cultural political agenda, like dissidence’ (Venuti, 1992: 148).

Venuti’s proposal, though it may seem at first glance to be extreme, raises an important question. He suggests that a translation practice which deliberately foregrounds the foreignness of a text could cause readers to rethink their own domestic norms and conventions, and recognize that by erasing the unfamiliar what is happening is actually a form of ethnocentric textual violence. The act of retaining the foreign therefore challenges the status quo and becomes a form of protest against the hegemony of domestic literary practices. This, Venuti suggests, is ‘abusive fidelity’, a translation technique that aspires to a faithfulness that is not dependent on fluency.

Of course this debate also raises the question of the status of translations and of translators. Translation, especially in the English-speaking world, is a poorly paid activity, often regarded as marginal and of less significance than other forms of writing. The skills required to be able to translate tend to be seen as less valuable and less ‘creative’ than other writerly skills. Venuti takes issue with this view, and deliberately entitled his book The Translator’s Invisibility, pointing out that the vital role played by a translator has tended to be ignored, to be invisible. His solution to this is for translators to become more visible, to develop innovative translation practices that will remind readers that the text they are reading did not originate in the language in which they are reading it, and to demand equal recognition as authors of works that they have translated.

Translating and the news

Making translators more visible is a laudable aim and one that clearly resonates in the literary world. However, when we consider news translation, the translator’s visibility is a completely different matter, and Venuti’s foreignization hypothesis ceases to hold any value. In news translation, the dominant strategy is absolute domestication, as material is shaped in order to be consumed by the target audience, so has to be tailored to suit their needs and expectations. Debates about formal and stylistic equivalence that have featured so prominently in literary translation cease to matter in a mode of translation that is primarily concerned with the transmission of information, though ideological shifts remain fundamentally important in all types of translation, as will be discussed more fully later.

Research into the strategies of news translation is still relatively under-developed, but already there is interest worldwide in examining the processes of exchange and transfer in the media. For in addition to the international news agencies, global TV channels now transmit news bulletins to millions of people and there is an expectation that news will be broadcast day and night, with regular updates throughout a twenty-four-hour period. The phrase ‘breaking news’ has entered everyday language, and news channels use this to heighten expectations and create a sense of anticipation. Regular updates with breaking news are now essential in an age of blogs and internet chat-rooms. If we take the situation of news reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, though the journalists embedded with the troops file their stories at speed, they may still be pre-empted by bloggers who go directly online with their version of events and bypass intermediary organizations such as agencies, translators or journalistic and television bureaus. Speed in transmitting information is vitally important in a highly competitive new market.

Christina Schäffner is an expert in translation and discourse analysis, specializing in the analysis of political discourse. She draws attention to the absence of research into the phenomenon of translation in political text analysis, pointing out that it is through translation that information is made available across linguistic borders and that frequently reactions in one country to statements made in another country ‘are actually reactions to the information as it was provided in translation’ (Schäffner, 2004: 120). Stressing the importance of understanding this, she poses a series of questions about how translators are trained, how they select material, which particular ideological constraints affect translation and what causal conditions seem to give rise to certain types of translation. In short, she highlights gaps in our knowledge about the translation of political discourse, gaps that are just as wide in our understanding of the translation of global news. Research in translation studies into issues of language and power has mainly been applied to discussions of literary texts, but clearly such issues are fundamentally important in the analysis of other discourses also, particularly in the translation of news. What research in this field is starting to show is that translation is one element in a complex set of processes whereby information is transposed from one language into another and then edited, rewritten, shaped and repackaged in a new context, to such a degree that any ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Power, language and translation
• 2 Globalization and translation
• 3 Globalization and news: the role of the news agencies in historical perspective
• 4 Translation in global news agencies
• 5 Journalism and translation: practices, strategies and values in the news agencies
• 6 Reading translated news: an analysis of agency texts
• 7 Translation and trust
• Appendix: the languages of global news
• Notes
• Bibliography