Journalistic translation research goes global: theoretical and methodological considerations five years on

ABSTRACT

This article presents an overview of the publications on journalistic translation research spanning the period 2015-present day. It includes three sections that highlight the main theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches used by researchers, namely discourse analysis and linguistics, sociology, and communication/journalism studies. As regards the latter, particularly relevant is the use of the concepts of framing, gatekeeping and convergence. These sections lead to a discussion of mixed method approaches, as defended and used by many researchers, and also serve to introduce the contributions to this issue, which represent the geographical, theoretical and methodological variety that now characterises journalistic translation research.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalist translation
• news translation
• 2015–2020
• theoretical approaches
• methodological issues

Introduction

In 2015 Kyle Conway edited a special issue of Perspectives devoted to ‘Culture and news translation’ featuring a review article entitled ‘Fifteen years of journalistic translation research and more’, in which I surveyed the emergence and consolidation of journalistic translation as a new subfield within translation studies (Valdeón, 2015). Since 2015 a number of monographs, edited collections and special issues have been published, as well as an important number of articles in ordinary issues of translation studies periodicals. Journals from other disciplines have also begun to show some interest in the role of translation in news production, including Journalism, which in 2011 had been the first journalism studies journal to devote a whole issue to news translation, with a specific focus on the World Service of the BBC.

In light of the above, the present article aims not only to introduce the contributions to this special issue of Perspectives, but also to review the publications since 2015, its themes and methodological approaches, highlighting the geographical areas where researchers are based, and their interaction with other disciplines. The next three sections will look at the links between journalistic translation on the one hand, and discourse and linguistic approaches, sociological studies and journalism studies on the other. It should be noted that this division is somehow artificial, as many authors typically combine two or more approaches in their work. These sections will also serve to introduce the articles in this issue of Perspectives.

Discourse analytical and linguistic approaches

Translation scholars exploring the features of journalistic translation have used a variety of theoretical frameworks, which in turn affect their methodological approaches. Many of these are clearly language-based (e.g., Karoly, 2017a, 2017b), while others are informed by linguistic-based approaches. For instance, Rasul (2019) has relied on Vinay & Darbelnet and Newmark to discuss news translation strategies. Although Rasul’s theoretical and methodological choices may be regarded as somehow dated, interestingly the choice of languages for his research is innovative, as English-Kurdish has been rarely discussed in the literature.

A translation studies model is also at the base of my study (Valdeón, 2016c) of Nobel laurate Paul Krugman’s New York Times economic op-eds and their translations into Spanish, as I drew on Nord’s functional model of text analysis for translation purposes. For her part, Scammell (2018) used the concepts of domestication and foreignization, which might not lend themselves very well for the study of translated news, to discuss English versions of Nicholas Sarkozy’s words during his visit to a Parisian neighbourhood with a large number of immigrants. Scammell also used Pedersen’s classification of culture specifics, in turn partly based on the domestication/foreignization dichotomy. In this special issue, Havumetsä draws on Justa Holz-Mänttäri’s concept of translatorial action for her study of a Russian-language speech in Finnish, which leads her to argue for the need of ‘a heightened awareness of translation issues involved in cross-cultural communication’ among journalists.

Like Scammell, Boulanger (2016) used a corpus-based method to the study of metaphors in the reporting of economic news in Canada, which allowed her to stress the role of the journalists/translators in propagating a neoliberal view of the economy. Van Poucke and Belikova (2016) also carried out a corpus-based study of metaphors, although they focused on Russian translations of Dutch, English and Finnish original news texts, which showed a tendency towards foreignization highlighting the critical views of Russia held in the West. Riggs (2019a) also analysed metaphors: those used by Britain’s conservative Daily Telegraph and left-leaning The Guardian in relation to representations of Muslims. Riggs posited that although these media use metaphors in different ways they both underscore the effects of Islamic violence. Riggs has also discussed stylistic issues in news translation (2019b, 2020). In the article in this special issue Riggs examines representations of the terrorist attack in Nice in July 2016 by considering the use of the term ‘jihad’ and the use of modality to turn suppositions into factual events.

Translation scholars have also shown a keen interest in discourse analytical approaches. In 2018 Meifang Zhang and Jeremy Munday guest edited a special issue of Perspectives devoted to the interface between discourse analysis and translation, featuring several papers with a special focus on news translation. Munday and Zhang (2015) had previously edited a special issue of Target devoted to discourse analysis in translation studies (later published in book format) in which Schäffner (2015) examined the role of interpreted-mediated press conferences and I discussed the concepts of stable and unstable sources in news translation (Valdeón, 2015). The 2018 special issue of Perspectives included a number of contributions that combined translation studies and discourse analysis. For example, Qin and Zhang (2018) drew on the concept of stance, discussed by Conrad & White and Martin & White, to uncover the political and social factors that influence Chinese translations of anglophone texts. Munday (2018), who applied Martin & White’s framework to the study of President Trump’s 2017 inauguration speech, used the resources of Appraisal theory, notably ‘attitude’, to assess the critical points in Donald Trump’s speech and how these were rendered into Spanish for five very different media: Spain’s El País Internacional and Canal 24 horas, US-based Telemundo, Mexican Excélsior and Russian RT Spanish. In addition, Munday compared the translations of Donald Trump’s speech to the translations of President Obama’s inauguration speech. Appraisal theory (and notably the notions of Judgement and Appreciation) is also at the base of a study by Manfredi (2018), who carried out a textual analysis of the ideological elements in the Italian versions of foreign news texts. For her study, Manfredi combined textual analysis with interviews with the news writers in order to corroborate her findings.

In line with Munday’s study, Caimotto (2019) has examined the Trump inauguration ceremony, although she focused on international media reactions and their translations. Caimotto used a critical approach to analyse Trump’s political language as reported worldwide, but with particular reference to seven online Italian news outlets. Critical discourse analysis is also the framework utilised by Palmer (2018) and Filmer (2018). Palmer analysed 189 news articles to identify the ways in which fixers, i.e., the local translators of foreign correspondents, are viewed by journalists and editors, while Filmer (2018) studied the representation of Italy in the British press during the Berlusconi years. Filmer’s article covered four recurring themes (homophobia, racism, sexism and fascism) and pointed to the perpetuation of stereotypes through the invisible processes of translation.

Moving away from Europe, Chinese researchers have been particularly keen on the use of discourse analytical approaches. Li (2018) drew on Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyse modality shifts in interpreted press conferences by Chinese leaders aimed at portraying the Chinese in a positive light, while Liang Xia’s monograph (2019), based on his doctoral thesis, combined discourse analysis and translation studies to analyse news production in Cankao Xiaoxi, a Chinese language newspaper published by the Xinhua news agency (also studied by Pan in 2014), which translates articles from various international news outlets in order to cater for a domestic readership. For her part, Bazzi (2019) has used functional linguistics as part of her critical discourse analysis of news texts reporting on conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen, published in the Middle East between 2013 and 2017.

The role of interpreters in the dissemination of news content has also begun to gain traction. Following the work of Schäffner (2015) and Munday (2018), Zheng and Ren (2018) studied the influence of interpreter-mediated versions of Chinese premiers in joint press conferences on the news reports published by The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Times among other Anglophone media, and have concluded that most of the quotations in Western media reproduced the words of the interpreters, used as reliable sources of information, irrespective of the deviations identified by Zheng and Ren (2018, p. 703). On the other hand, Gu (2019a, 2019b) has applied a critical analytical approach to the study of press conferences by Chinese premiers and has shown a tendency on the part of journalists to align themselves with the official line of the government and thus disseminate a positive image of China in English (2019a). This is achieved by stressing the relationship of the Chinese government with China’s population by means of the word ‘people’ (2019b). Gu, who has repeatedly applied critical discourse analysis in his work (2018, 2019c), contributes to this special issue with an article in which he and his colleague Rebecca Tipton explore self-referentiality in mediated press conferences by Chinese premiers. In their article, they posit that this allows interpreters to support the legitimacy of the government and convey ‘collective intentionality’. For her part, Đorđević (also in this issue) applies a critical approach to the translations of headlines and leads from Reuters news texts into Serbian, focusing on the discursive strategy of argumentation. Đorđević finds that Serbian media tend to show affiliation to the Serbian government even when the news does not report on anything Serbian.

To conclude this section, it is worth mentioning the work carried out by Károly (2017a, 2017b), who carried out descriptive linguistic studies of English-Hungarian news translation. Drawing on Halliday & Hasan, and Halliday & Matthiessen, she analysed the linear progression of conjunctions as well as the translational shifts and discourse-level translation strategies occurring in news texts translated into Hungarian (Károly, 2017a). More importantly, she delved into coherence, topical and rhetorical structure in her comprehensive monograph (2017b) on news translation.

Sociological approaches to journalistic translation

Over the past three decades, sociology has informed translation studies scholars working on a wide range of topics, from translation history to interpreting. Journalistic translation has also benefitted from sociological approaches, in particular Baker’s (2006) adaptation of Somers and Gibson’s narrative theory. For instance, Zanettin (2016) drew on Baker for his analysis of media recontextualization of international politics, while Spiessens and van Poucke (2016) combined concepts such as framing and selective appropriation with tools of critical discourse analysis to delve into the strategies carried out by Russian news translators working for the website InoSMI when rendering material from American, British and French sources on the Crimean crisis. Spiessens and van Poucke claimed that news translators portrayed Russia as an honourable player on the world’s political stage while presenting the West in a negative light. In addition, Spiessens (2019) has applied narrative theory to the analysis of the news texts reporting on the war in Ukraine and finds that InoSMI activates schemata reminiscent of World War II to portray the Russians as patriots and the Ukranians as fascists. Baker’s model is also used in Sashi and Talebinejad’s analysis (2017) of a statement delivered in Farsi by an Iranian general and of the translated versions published by the BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The New York Times, Aljazeera and Almonitor.

Narrative theory has been used to examine the rendition of press conferences by US President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao. Liao and Pan (2018) combined Wadensjö’s approach to the study of interpreting processes and narrative theory in order to examine differences between the original and translated versions of the premiers’ speeches. Liao and Pan posited that the interpreter’s institutional role can affect the resulting product and, consequently, the image of the relationship between the two countries as presented by global media.

On the other hand, sociological approaches are present in a study of the so-called activist translation, whereby volunteer translators perform translation for non-traditional media in an attempt to counteract the hegemony of major international companies in news production. Drawing on Baker, Kim (2019) has studied translational practices in NewsPro, a Korean website that translates news from several languages, mostly Western, and from sources such as the CNN, the BBC and Le Monde. Particularly interesting is the fact that NewsPro relies on translators rather than journalists, even though the degree of ideological manipulation remains high as the stories aim to ‘challenge the dominant mainstream discourse of the Korean media’ (2019, p. 163).

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has been an influential figure for a number of translation studies researchers. In journalistic translation research, Hernández Hernández (2017) used the concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘capital’ to analyse how journalists and translators deal with organisational and evaluative structures in their institutions, with particular reference to Le Monde diplomatique en español. Hernández Hernández, who combined the use of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework with interviews with journalists/translators, unveiled the intricate set of political and economic relations involved in the production of the Spanish version of Le Monde diplomatique for the various Spanish-speaking areas. In this special issue, Boulanger and Gagnon draw on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic power’, combined with tools of Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis model, to examine how the anglophone and francophone press mediated the concept of ‘transparency’ in a corpus of newspapers ranging from 2001 to 2008.

Communication studies and journalistic translation research

Border Crossings (Gambier & van Doorslaer, 2016) includes a chapter in which Juliane House and Jens Loenhoff discussed issues pertaining to translation and communication studies. The editors organised the book as a dialogue between a translation studies scholar on the one hand and a researcher from another discipline on the other, but, while in some of the other chapters the dialogue is more fluid, House and Loenhoff (2016) did not quite succeed in bringing together the two disciplines, as they focused on their respective fields of enquiry without really engaging in a meaningful dialogue. This may be partly due to the theorisation of the concept of ‘translation’ (or rather the lack of it) in journalism and/or communication studies, where research into the translation activity remains very marginal despite its centrality in the profession. To be sure, a recent study into journalism studies journals (Valdeón, 2018) shows that journalism scholars tend to use the term ‘translation’ in a generic way, i.e., to refer to any kind of transformation processes, or, alternatively, to refer to word-for-word translation. Only on rare occasions does the term refer to the concept as used by contemporary translation studies scholars.

However, translation scholars have frequently borrowed concepts from communication studies. In her study of Cankao Xiaoxi (or Reference News), Pan (2014) had used concepts from translation studies, such as ‘transediting’ (never used by journalism scholars, see Valdeón, 2018), and also from communication studies, notably gatekeeping. More recently, Song (2017) explored how gatekeeping can affect the representation of political actors in a Western-style democracy such as South Korea. Song analysed the role played by Yonhap News Agency, described as a de facto state agency, in the selection and translation of New York Times articles about the Korean government, and noted that the general tendency is to avoid negative representations. In line with this, in 2016 I had argued that translation was a second-order gatekeeping mechanism (Valdeón, 2016a). In other words, translation may function as a gatekeeping mechanism once the news items worth publishing are selected. As Song shows, translation strategies can offer a different representation of the same news actors and events. However, more recently I have explored the role of translation as a first-level gatekeeping mechanism (Valdeón, Forthcoming). That is, the choices concerning what texts should or should not be translated are reflective of the role of translation as a gatekeeping mechanism even before the texts are translated. The status of translation as a first-level gatekeeping mechanism is discussed in relation to that of ideological affinity, using the simultaneous appointments of a new Socialist Prime Minister and of a new editor in El País, both in Spain, as a unique case in point.

‘Framing’ has been an extremely productive concept in fields such as communication, linguistics and sociology. Xia (2019) examined it in connection with Cankao Xiaoxi, and posited that ‘a translator develops a particular conceptualisation of a piece of news or reorients his interpretation of the news item. Decision making in communication affects frames in thought and overall attitudes’ (2019, p. 38). Thus, journalists and translators have the power to shape and reshape the representation of events, and, consequently, to frame them in particular ways. Framing is equally central to Liu’s discussions (2017, 2019) of journalistic translation. In her study of the Chinese versions of three top news stories originally published by the Financial Times and later in Cankao Xiaoxi, Liu concluded that the latter acted as a mouthpiece for the government by selecting only positive coverage of China ‘in order to strengthen the positive frame of the Chinese economy through the translation of financial news’ (2017, p. 460) published in the West. This served to represent the Chinese economy in a very positive light while the West was undergoing an economic recession. In fact, Liu (2019) has proposed the term ‘transframing’ to bridge the gap between translation and journalism studies, and, to some extent, to replace the by-now classical concept of transediting, first used by Karen Stetting thirty years ago.

As mentioned above, the concept of framing has also been used by other disciplines, notably sociology. Baker (2006) drew on Somers and Gibson’s narrative theory to delve into ideological issues underlying translations, including the use of framing. Since then, other researchers have resorted to Baker’s adaptation of narrative theory to study politically charged journalistic translations. Qin and Zhang (2018), for instance, studied 47 news texts on the Edward Snowden case focusing on selective appropriation and labelling as two framing (or reframing) strategies of the news event. Paradoxically, Qin and Zhang found that while the English texts do not pay much attention to China’s involvement in the event, the Chinese texts condemned the US for its ‘massive surveillance programme’ (2018, p. 273), presenting the American government in a very negative light.

Convergence is another concept from communication studies that has received some attention, notably in the collected work Journalism and Translation in the Era of Convergence, edited by Lucile Davier and Kyle Conway, who described convergence as ‘a chameleon’ (2019, p. 1). Thus, convergence is a feature of contemporary journalism: news texts are adapted to new modes as well as to different cultural and linguistic environments. Drawing on Deuze, Davier & Conway define convergence in terms of cooperation or synergy between different media. The chapters of the book explore the various ways in which multilingual news corporations incorporate multimodal material into their products. Gendron, Conway, and Davier (2019), for instance, examined the techniques used by journalists to use translated speech into news stories in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, both in French and English. They combined textual analysis with an ethnographic approach in order to show that translation can appear in three different ways: ‘voice-over in embedded video (where a speaker’s voice was audible before the journalist presented a spoken translation at a louder volume than the speaker), translation of video or sound in the accompanying written text, and subtitles in embedded video’ (2019, p. 71). This applies mostly to national news events as the translation of regional stories is less frequently signalled (2019, p. 74). This difference can be accounted for in terms of the technological advances at the disposal of the larger national news corporations on the one hand, and in relation to the different notions of responsibility towards their target audiences on the other. It also points to the existence of a different visibility of the translational activity in national and regional news items. News reports tend to be more politically loaded when dealing with federal stories (Gendron et al., 2019, p. 78).

Related to forms of journalism convergence, it is worth mentioning that researchers are also beginning to study the ways in which news is shaped by social media and how new media also contribute to shaping and manipulating news events. Hernández Guerrero (2017) analysed Mediapart, a French independent online news organisation which represents a new type of media aiming at providing contemporary readers with independent and unbiased information. Hernández Guerrero rightly opposes the over-simplistic interpretation of alternative media as being more inclined to support counter-hegemonic points of view (2017, p. 296). These media are supposed to allow audiences a greater interaction with news producers and ‘to shatter tiered hierarchies by covering previously undocumented stories and giving voice to formerly voiceless people’, as Roumanos and Noblet describe the mission of the HuffPost (2019, p. 110). However, whether these new media will contribute to more democratic societies or whether they simply exemplify different forms of manipulation remains to be seen. In fact, in line with this, in one of the first studies into the representation of immigration in newspapers and their corresponding Facebook sites, Welbers and Opgenhaffen (2019) found that there were no significant differences between traditional media and social media editors, although it has to be added that Welbers and Opgenhaffen focused on mainstream new media only. The crucial role that social media played in contemporary news production and translation is examined in this special issue by Hernández Guerrero on the one hand, and Abudayeh & Dubbati on the other. Both study the interaction between Donald Trump’s controversial discourse, social media, mainstream news outlets and translation, the former focusing on Spanish versions and the latter on Arabic ones.

The widely used classification of news texts into ‘hard versus soft news’ has served Park (2016) to analyse the multimodal nature of newspapers, and, more precisely, of photo captions, in three sets of news outlets in English, Korean and Japanese. Park studied four Anglophone media (AP, Reuters, The Washington Post and The New York Times), five Korean companies (Yonhap News, NEWSis, Chosun Ilbo, Joongang Daily and Dong-A Ilbo) and four Japanese ones (Kyodo News, Jiji Press, Yomiuri Shimbun and The Mainichi) and found that there were important differences between the three languages/cultures, particularly between Korean and English. Multimodal features of translated news texts were also considered in my study of the English and Spanish versions of the BBC reports about the death and funeral of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Valdeón, 2019) in BBCNews and BBCMundo respectively. I showed that the selection of photographs in the Spanish articles as well as in their co-texts can affect the narrative of the event, and, hence, the audience’s perception.

To conclude this section, it is worth noting that the interaction between journalism and translation is beginning to take place in periodicals specialising in journalism studies: the work of translation scholars such as Valdeón (2018) and Hong (2018) has recently appeared in Journalism, one of the major journals in the discipline. Hong discussed the concept of attribution in the context of journalistic translation in South Korea, and analysed how the changes during the translation process may affect the credibility of the news.

In addition, it should be noted that some communication scholars have continued to show an interest in the importance of translation in news production. The role of translation in news writing can indeed be traced back to the birth of journalism in the early modern period, although most communication scholars only mention it in passing (Valdeón, 2018). This has begun to change in recent years. More precisely, Lindsay Palmer (2018, 2019a, 2019b) has turned her attention to the crucial role of fixers, the individuals who assist foreign correspondents, often in conflict zones. Palmer has carried out textual analyses of news articles (2018), and has also conducted interviews with fixers (2019a, 2019b), to stress the invaluable contribution that these agents make to the journalistic profession, as they provide correspondents with linguistic and cultural knowledge. For further information on Palmer, 2019b, see also the book review at the end of this special issue by Jerry Palmer (please notice that Jerry and Lindsay are not related).

Finally, Conway (2017), who works at the crossroads of translation and communication studies, pondered on an intriguing question: what would happened if media scholars developed a theory of translation? He suggested that Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding/decoding’ dichotomy might have something to say in this respect to media scholars as it can provide ‘a prism through which we can view key terms such as communication, transformation and translation’ (Conway, 2017, p. 712).

Final remarks

As the above sections demonstrate, theoretical frameworks and specific methods are clearly intertwined in journalistic translation research. In this regard, the special issue of Across Languages and Cultures, published in 2018, is of particular notice. Edited by Lucile Davier, Christina Schäffner & Luc van Doorslaer, the contributions explored ‘new methodological paths’ (2018, p. 161), while they also aimed to ‘encourage additional research using a variety of methods for investigating news translation in its complexity’. For example, Davier and van Doorslaer (2018) contributed to the special issue of Across Languages and Cultures with an article in which they examined the difficulties that translation scholars face in tracing source texts, as ‘the unique source text has collapsed, and the same goes for the unique author’ (2018, p. 242). Drawing on Johansson (2003), a possible solution to the problem, Davier and van Doorslaer add, could be the compilation of multilingual comparable corpora, with traces of translations (2018, p. 245). As the main characteristic of these corpora is that they tend to be content-based (2018, p. 247), Davier and van Doorslaer suggested combining textual with other research methodologies. In the same vein, Gagnon, Boulanger, and Kalentari (2018) proposed the compilation of corpora, bilingual in their case, as part of a mixed-method approach to their pilot study of financial news in Canadian newspapers. Boulanger and Gagnon contribute to this special issue with a mixed-method study of the financial terms ‘transparency’ and transparence in the Canadian press during the period 2001–2008. For their part, Caimotto and Gaspari (2018) also supported the use of corpus-based studies in combination with discourse analytical tools, particularly those of critical discourse analysis. In their view, this can contribute to exploring the underlying ideological biases in news texts, already a prominent theme in news translation research in the years before the period covered here (Valdeón, 2015, p. 647).

A mixed methodology is also suggested by Manfredi (2018) and van Rooyen (2018). Manfredi combined interviews with some of the individuals responsible for the translations that appeared in Internazionale and Italiadallestero with the use of Appraisal theory in order to explore the ways in which Italians are portrayed in foreign media, and then translated for Italian audiences. For her part, van Rooyen analysed the complexity of news translation by taking a look at the peculiarities of community radio in South Africa, a country with eleven official languages and many economic and social problems, and where the radio plays a crucial mediating role. Finally, Matsushita and Schäffner (2018) defended the value of carrying out research involving more than one language pair on the one hand, and non-European languages on the other. Matsushita and Schäffner studied the Japanese Prime Minister’s speech delivered on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of Japan’s surrender at the end of WWII.

All of these articles stress the need to combine methodological approaches with some of the theoretical tenets discussed in the previous sections of the present article. This, of course, has characterised many of the publications of the past five years. Indeed, Davier and van Doorslaer (2018) suggest triangulating textual analysis with interviews with journalists in order to gain a deeper insight of the translation practices involved in news production. Examples of this are the publications by Davier (2017), Gendron et al. (2019), Haapanen and Perrin (2019), Roumanos and Noblet (2019), Matsushita (2019a), Rasul (2019), Hong (2019) and Manfredi (2018), which combined ethnographic approaches with content or textual analysis. For her part, van Rooyen’s mixed method approach drew on Actor-Network theory and interviews with reporters (2019).

Some other studies have combined images studies (or imagology) and translation studies in order to explore the political implications of journalistic translation in the creation and manipulation of images of the ‘other’ as well as of the ‘self’. Image studies are at the base of the articles by Filmer (2016) and Valdeón (2016b), both of which are contributions to the collection Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology. In her article Filmer demonstrated that translation was employed as a tool to perpetuate negative news narratives of Italy, while Valdeón discussed El País’s attempt to disseminate a positivized image of Spain by emphasising cultural events and the success of Spanish sportsmen and women (at least before the country’s economic and political crises of the second decade of the twenty-first century).

Finally, concepts from the financial world on the one hand and an interest in the history of journalism on the other are at the base of the last articles I would like to mention before the authors in this special issue start speaking. As regards the former, Matsushita (2019b) has used the 2012 US presidential election to scrutinise translation choices through the lens of risk and risk management in news translation. As for the latter, and perhaps more importantly, it is worth mentioning the work carried out by the Montreal-based Histal group. Led by Georges Bastin, Histal specialises in the history of translation in Latin America, including the translation of periodicals. Navarro and Poupeney Hart (2019), for instance, have recently investigated the role of translation in the Gaceta de Guatemala. In the US, Gasca Jiménez, Álvarez, and Fernández (2019) have analysed 374 issues of sixty Spanish-language newspapers in the American Southwest published during the period 1808–1980. They have shown that, although legislation was passed after the annexation of the borderlands in order to replace Spanish by English, newspapers resisted assimilation both by publishing original material and by translating English-language articles into Spanish. In China, Li (2019) has analysed the importance of serialised translated literature in Hong Kong’s The Chinese Mail in the period 1904–1908. The connection between the shaping of political identities and conflict, central to most of these articles, is also explored by Lovett (2019) and Çelik (2019). The former delves into how translations were used by left-wing periodicals during Germany’s Weimer Republic, while the latter studies the centrality of translation in the magazine Hawar in forming a Kurdish identity, often in conflict with the Turkish culture. Historical approaches should indeed be encouraged to bring to the fore the importance of translation in the appearance and consolidation of journalism as a profession.

As the review in this introductory article and the papers in this special issue demonstrate, interest in news translation has grown exponentially over the past five years. In fact, this collection is not the result of a call for papers or a selection of the talks given at a specific academic meeting. During the past eighteen months or so, the journal received a sizeable number of submissions exploring journalistic translation. Unfortunately, some of them did not survive the refereeing process. However, the eight articles in this issue highlight the avid interest of international researchers in journalistic translation. In them, contributors from around the globe approached the topic from various perspectives, each one focusing on a specific language pair, most of them involving English as the contemporary lingua franca of news production and translation. The accepted articles, which make a fine collection worth publishing as a special issue, indicated that the time had come to look back and see what had happened in the five years after the publication of the 2015 special issue edited by Kyle Conway. From Canada to China, from the US to the Arab world, from Finland to Spain, journalistic translation research has gone truly global.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Roberto A. Valdeón is a full professor at the University of Oviedo (Spain), an honorary professor at Jinan University (China) and a research fellow at the University of the Free State (South Africa). He is a member of the Academy of Europe, the editor-in-chief of Perspectives and the general editor of the Benjamins Translation Library.