Instances of translatorial action: a journalist as a translating reporter of speech

ABSTRACT

This paper examines a case of a Finnish foreign correspondent exhibiting translatorial action by reporting on a Russian-language speech in Finnish, in journalistic articles. The material consists of (1) a Finnish-language liveblog, with translated sections of the speech appearing in (2) an online article and (3) a printed article based on the speech. The concepts of translatorial action and reported speech are applied as well as research into journalistic quoting. The results of the study show that quoting practices appear to be similar in both monolingual and translated reported speech and that summarizing is a common strategy used, even in direct quotes. Interdisciplinary efforts between journalism and translation research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Translatorial action
• journalistic translation
• Finnish
• Russian
• reported speech
• quoting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nina Havumetsä is a university teacher of translation (Russian to Finnish) at the University of Eastern Finland. She holds a PhD in translation studies awarded by the University of Helsinki in 2012. Her current research interests include translation in journalism, quality of translation, and the norms of translation.

Notes

1 According to Koskinen (2017, p. 43), translational action covers, in addition to actually translating a message and the activities that enable it, ‘general social and cultural opportunities, norms, controls and requirements’ created for such action.

2 Reproducing speech in written form is far from straightforward in any case (see e.g. Tiittula & Nuolijärvi, 2016).

3 Page numbers in references to Haapanen (2017) are according to his doctoral thesis available online, not article-specific.

4 All comments and quotes by the journalist, as well as information about his working methods, are according to personal email correspondence conducted in Finnish.

5 When attached to verbs in the imperative, the suffix -pa softens the request and adds a tone of familiarity. The suffix -s makes the tone even more informal.