Translating News Texts for Specific Linguistic Audiences
Translating News Texts for Specific Linguistic Audiences

Summary/Abstract: In a world marked by communication and conflict, mass media tends to minimize the essential role of translation in facilitating linguistic and cultural exchanges on the international scene. This paper purports to present and explain the situations in which translators have to fill up the gap existing between translation and media projects, as well as to examine the ways in which geographic, socio-cultural and linguistic coordinates may influence the process of editing (and sometimes transediting) of the global news. The methods used for highlighting cultural differences are both quantitative (based on a selection of articles from the British, French and Romanian press; for example, Romania’s 2009 presidential elections and its echoes in the British and French press) and qualitative (particularly documentary, based on the latest research in the field). The inductive methods consist in identifying the textual and extra-textual strategies involved in the translation process and in exemplifying the editorial conventions applicable to the news coming from a different socio-cultural context. The expected outcomes of this paper are to highlight the causes of the refractions undergone by source information and to emphasize the translator’s overlooked role as, for most of the times, (s)he remains invisible in order to guarantee the quality of the translation and to respect the work and vision of the person producing the news. Last but not least, when it comes to news translation, the word translation itself gains new meanings, different from its traditional ones, as readers are totally unaware of the translational operations the articles they are reading have been through.

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