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Abstract
This article explores the relationship between news translation and culture through linguistic analysis. It is based on two corpora of translated news texts, each consisting of c. 237,000 words. One corpus represents the translation carried out by international news agencies in the contemporary news industry, whereas the other corpus represents the first two centuries of periodical news in French (1631–1789). Through the analysis of the lexis of translated news, I show that translation in the press can be considered both a silent witness to the relationships between peoples and also a channel for innovation in cultural systems.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was supported by a grant from the Diplomacy and Culture Colloquium at the Institute of International Studies, University of California Berkeley (2013–2014). Thanks go to my research assistant, Jenelle Thomas, who was responsible for the data extraction and the transcription of the editions of the Gazette de France from 1782. Thanks go also to two anonymous reviewers for their careful analysis of an earlier version of this article.
Notes on contributor
Mairi McLaughlin is an Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley and an Affiliated Member of the Linguistics Department. She specializes in French Linguistics and Translation Studies. Her first book, Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation, was published by Legenda in 2011. Her current project explores the origins and evolution of journalistic French from 1631 to 1789.
Notes
1. The agency is not identified here in order to protect the anonymity of the journalists.
2. See McLaughlin (Citation2011, pp. 25–29).
3. There is a long tradition of using the letter ‘p’ to sample lexical data because it is often the most frequent letter (alongside ‘c’) in general dictionaries of French. See, for example, the figures presented by Sjöblom (Citation2006, p. 562 n. 3). Its use in the current study reflects the need for a clearly delimited sample that nevertheless accounts for a large amount of data. In the case of the contemporary corpus, for example, words beginning with the letter ‘p’ represent 14% of the total corpus. The figure for the historical corpus is 11%. A future study could use a different sampling process in order to capture data from each letter of the alphabet.
4. Here and throughout basic etymological information comes from the Trésor de la langue française informatique (TLFi) (http://atilf.atilf.fr).
5. See for example Ayres-Bennett and Carruthers with Temple (2001, pp. 324–325).
6. For more detail on these and other sub-types, see Ayres-Bennett and Carruthers with Temple (2001, p. 325).
7. Bielsa and Bassnett (Citation2009, pp. 49–50) provide references to other research on the question of representativity.
8. Dispatches are referenced throughout by their date and time of publication on the newswire.
9. On the value of financial clients, see Bielsa and Bassnett (Citation2009, p. 49) who discuss ‘the subordinated place that general news now occupies within globalized communication markets’.
10. See, for example, Bernard-Béziard and Attali's (Citation2012) analysis of L’Équipe.
11. ‘Proactif’ does not yet feature in the TLFi.
12. I was able to access the agency's style guide during fieldwork.
13. Moirand (Citation2007) draws attention to the media's construction of memory through interdiscursive quotations.
14. For more information on these titles, see Feyel (Citation2000) and Rétat (Citation2001).
15. For more information on the composition and structure of the corpus, see McLaughlin (in progress). As recognized in the acknowledgements, the transcriptions of the 1782 editions of the Gazette were carried out under my direction by my research assistant, Jenelle Thomas.
16. An example of this is Saada and Sgard’s (Citation2005) work on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
17. See McLaughlin (Citationforthcoming) for detailed information about the role that translation played in the gathering and preparation of news for publication in early-modern gazettes.
18. See, for example, Duval, Rey and Siouffi (Citation2007).
19. The lack of news about France and other Francophone countries in the contemporary corpus can be explained by the fact that news about these countries is not translated from English but written originally in French by agency journalists. For the historical corpus, the absence of news about France is explained by the constraints which were imposed upon the authors of the Gazette by censors who prevented reporting about French politics in the titles under royal control until the 1770s (Feyel, Citation1999: 13).
20. Quotations from the historical corpus are referenced with the name of the periodical and its date of publication.
21. Historians of the press provide useful information on the sources used by journalists in the early-modern period. See, for example, Feyel (Citation2000).
22. The alternation of font type was used to distinguish between the reporting discourse that introduces the letter and the letter itself.
23. ‘Roemals’ and ‘salempouris’ are so rare that they do not appear in the TLFi.
24. English is closely followed by German in this ranking but this can be attributed to the high frequency of the sixteenth-century borrowing ‘Protestant’.