The translation of tweets in Spanish digital newspapers

ABSTRACT

Twitter has become an essential tool in newsrooms worldwide. Tweets included in news texts function as quotations and though this discursive practice is relatively recent it continues to grow in digital media. Many of these tweets are written in languages different from that of the receiving media company. This article analyzes how foreign tweets are presented to audiences and how they are translated when inserted in news texts. For this, we have examined the articles from the first five months of 2018 in the Universo Trump [Trump Universe] blog published by the Spanish digital newspaper El País. This blog publishes news about the president of the United States, the people he surrounds himself with as well as his government and it was selected because all the tweets cited in the articles are originally in English. This article presents the translation strategies used by the journalist-translators and we argue that the translation of tweets as quotes in news reports, especially when accompanied by a screenshot of the original tweet, makes the use of translation more obvious and more visible in the transmission of information.

KEYWORDS:

• News translation
• Twitter
• translation of tweets
• quotation
• social media
• visibility of translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

María José Hernández Guerrero is tenured lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Málaga, Spain. She has worked as editor of TRANS: Revista de Traductología and as co-director of the Master’s degree in Traducción para el Mundo Editorial (Translation for the publishing industry). Her studies focus on journalistic translation and literary translation. Among many other works, she is the author of Marcel Schowb: Escritor y traductor (Alfar, 2002) and Traducción y periodismo (Peter Lang, 2009), as well as co-editor of La traducción periodística (Un. de Castilla La Mancha, 2005) and La traducción, factor de cambio (Peter Lang, 2008).

ORCID

María José Hernández Guerrero http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1099-0602

Notes

1 Universo Trump blog (https://elpais.com/elpais/blogs.html).

2 Transfluent (https://www.transfluent.com/es/2017/01/el-twitter-del-presidente-trump-en-espanol-djt_es/).

3 Though not the objective of this study, we feel we should mention the problems incurred in the translation of Trump’s discourse. Recently, several studies have explored how the U.S. President employs Twitter as a strategic instrument to disseminate his discourse (Kreis, 2017) and the meaning and function of Trump’s discursive strategies on Twitter (Ott, 2017). Volume 21, Number 5 of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies is dedicated exclusively to ‘Translating Trump’, with several articles which analyze the problems of translating President Trump's words (cf. Harsin, 2017; Doyle, 2017; Torner, 2017; Tsuruta, 2017).

4 Hurtado Albir (2001, p. 395) calls the capacity to navigate the transfer process from the original text to the elaboration of the final text ‘transfer competence’. This allows, among other things, the switch from one language to another without interference.

5 Cambridge Monitor 4: Europa ante el espejo [Europe before the mirror] (http://www.cambridge.es/nosotros/cambridge-monitor/europa-ante-el-espejo).

6 ‘Premièrement, j’identifie l’invisibilite d’une activité perçue ou projetée de l’extérieur ; deuxièment, l’invisibilité subie par les professionnels ; et troisièmement, l’invisibilité textuelle créée par un style d’écriture très idiomatique’ (Davier, 2017, p. 150).