What is the role of culture in news translation? A materialist approach

Figures & data

Table 1. Three approaches to news translation and their respective meanings of ‘culture’, ‘news’, and ‘translation’.

Approaches		Questions each approach helps answer	Dominant meanings of ‘culture’	Dominant meanings of ‘news’	Dominant meanings of ‘translation’
political economy	micro-level (gate-keeping)	How do journalists decide which stories to cover?	culture as community	information	rewriting of news stories, in whole or part
	macro-level (news flows)	What social, political, and economic factors shape which stories are covered and where?	culture as community	information	rewriting of news stories, in whole or part
linguistics	micro-level (word choice)	What factors influence journalists’ lexical choices when rewriting quotations or whole stories?	anthropological culture; culture as community	information	re-expression of quotations or other documents; rewriting of news stories, in whole or part
	macro-level (corpus analysis)	What do translated news stories reveal about words imported from one language to another?	anthropological culture; culture as community	information	rewriting of news stories, in whole or part
sociology/cultural studies	micro-level (transediting)	How do journalists understand their role in the newsroom? What do they assume their readers, viewers, or listeners know?	anthropological culture; culture as community	information	re-expression of quotations or other documents; rewriting of news stories, in whole or part
	macro-level (social change)	How do journalists understand their role in society? How does this understanding shape their choices about what to report and how?	anthropological culture; symbolic culture; culture as community	information; human-interest; analysis; opinion	interpretation of cultural ‘others’, possibly incorporating linguistic re-expression

Figure 1. A materialist approach to culture.

Figure 2. The political economic, linguistic, and sociological/cultural studies approaches mapped onto the materialist approach.