Journalistic Translation Research Goes Global

Roberto A. Valdeón

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000399318
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Journalism

Drawing on a variety of theoretical concepts and methods, this book addresses the interface between language, politics and translation. The contributors analyse the role, practice and impact of journalistic translation in Canada, China, Arab countries, France, Spain, the Ukraine, Finland and Serbia.

The introductory chapter surveys the evolution of journalistic translation research during the period 2015-2020. The chapters that follow delve into the role of language and translation in news production with a specific focus on the connections with politics and power. The authors analyse Canadian newspapers in French and English during the subprime crises, the representation of Muslims in three European newspapers in the aftermath of Nice terrorist attacks, the translation of Donald Trumps' tweets in Spain, the role of evaluation in opinion articles in the Ukraine, the use of reported speech in Finnish articles, the translation of Donald Trump's offensive comments into Arabic and so on. In the discussions, the authors draw on functional grammar, critical discourse analysis, Appraisal theory and pragmatics.

This volume will appeal to all those interested in the ways translation shapes media constructions of news events and showcases the centrality of journalistic translation research as a dynamic subfield within translation studies.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice.

The translation of ‘transparency’ in the Canadian press: an inquiry into symbolic power^*

Pier-Pascale Boulanger

and Chantal Gagnon

ABSTRACT

Despite new transparency regulation in 2002, a lack of transparency was identified only five years later among the causes of the financial crisis in North America. With this paradox in mind, the authors investigated the terms ‘transparency’ and ‘transparence’ in a corpus of seven Canadian newspapers (English and French) comprising nine million words, from the Dot-com crash of 2001 to the subprime crisis of 2007–2008. When contrasted with a test corpus of annual reports, the press corpus showed that during this period journalists mentioned ‘transparency’ intermittently, and most frequently in 2007–2008, whereas the banks used it with a steady increase. When represented on a Transparency Perception Continuum, the data showed the press as critically pointing to a lack of transparency, and the banks as positively or neutrally discussing transparency. It was also evidenced that English-Canadian reporters used a wider array of sources than did their French-speaking counterparts when recasting statements on transparency. The francophone press seldom quoted American sources, selecting instead statements originally made in French by local banks in the province of Québec. The findings show that by avoiding translation the French-Canadian press contributed to a more bank-centric view on transparency, entangled in the production of a dominant discourse.

One key factor behind the recent troubles in the money markets was, I believe, a lack of transparency. Transparency can, of course, mean different things in different contexts. (David Dodge, Governor of the Bank of Canada, September 2007)

* The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.5683/SP/NPOOFB.

Introduction

Elected ‘Word of the Year’ for 2003 by the editors of the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, ‘transparency’ is a term that is used by various economic agents, for instance central banks, market regulators and corporations, seeking to bolster investor confidence. In North America, transparency, or financial disclosure, is required of publicly traded corporations, which must report clear, timely and true accounting information for investors to assess the risks involved in buying shares or bonds. The language used by corporations to communicate publicly has drawn the attention of scholars in the fields of pragmatics, behavioural finance and accounting, as to the relation between linguistic matter and financial decision-making (Rocci, Palmieri, & Gautier, 2015). The business press relies on wires issued by corporations’ public relations officers, who act as authoritative sources providing reliable information, meanwhile controlling the message. An ever-growing body of scholarship has been investigating the reliance of business journalism on financial elite sources and the resulting promotion of their neoliberal views in the media (see Schiffrin, 2015). It thus appears relevant to survey financial journalism in translation as a site of dominant discourse formation on a topic of social concern such as transparency.

What follows is a study of seven Canadian mainstream newspapers ranging from 2001 to 2008. It is part of a larger project aimed at understanding how the Canadian press contributes to the production of the financial discourse and to the reproduction of a social order which confers power on already influential economic agents. The study at hand is spurred by the fact that a lack of transparency was pinpointed as one of the causes of the 2007–2008 financial crisis in North America (Dodge, 2007; Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission [FCIC], 2011), despite the adoption of transparency regulation in 2002. We will start by explaining how the contrastive insight of translation studies combined with critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power enables us to survey how the anglophone and francophone press mediated transparency. We will define transparency in the context of finance and expound on the mixed methodology underlying the design and search of the journalistic corpus. We will then discuss our results, which will lead us to argue that, through sourcing and specific word patterns, the press contributed to reinforcing the discourse of banks at a time when their reputations were undermined by substantial financial losses.

CDA and symbolic power: a framework

With the globalization of news, researchers have been paying close attention to the dynamics of translation in the media (Bielsa & Bassnett, 2009; Davier, 2017; Schäffner & Bassnett, 2010; Valdeón, 2012, 2015). Our investigation inquires into the construction of financial news through translation much like research on framing (see Kuo & Nakamura, 2005; Liu, 2017; Rodriguez & Santos, 2015), with the exception that it examines intralingual processes of translation rather than interlingual ones. In our corpus, intralingual translation occurs when journalists popularize the complexities of finance for lay audiences. By surveying a bilingual corpus, we shed light on the ways the idea of transparency was rendered and contextualized by the press for two different linguistic communities. Financial news is the site par excellence of the global-local paradox noted by Orengo (2005): although financial markets and crises operate on a global scale, journalists work to make sense of them for their local readers.

Simply put, how was transparency covered and constructed by the press in the bilingual context of Canada? Relying on CDA, we observe how the term ‘transparency’ is distributed in the business sections of mainstream newspapers over a span of eight years. Vocabulary, collocations and quotations in news reports are among the linguistic features that CDA surveys and through which the neoliberal doxa is enacted (Fairclough, 1995). With regard to the latter and symbolic power in mainstream media, our assumption is that the press reproduces the dominant discourse of powerful economic agents often quoted by journalists. It is based on Fairclough’s argument that ‘the capacity of the capitalist class and other power holders to exercise this power depend[s] on systematic tendencies in news reporting’ (1989, p. 54). As the statements and views of the same groups are regularly recast among large audiences, they garner power, which for Mautner is the capacity ‘to shape widely shared constructions of reality’ (2008, p. 32).

‘Transparency’ is a brave new word that bears a positive value, especially when understood in the larger context of openness and governance, where the relationships between citizens, the state and society are being reshaped as technology allows for increased accessibility of information (Guglielmi & Zoller, 2014). It has become a byword (Dincer & Eichengreen, 2009, p. 1) that now affords a strong social value. However, we contend that it is an ‘empty signifier’, the term Laclau uses to explain how strategic words are objects of a struggle, as dominant discourses seek to fill them with a meaning that promotes their interests (1996, pp. 43–44). In so doing, they exclude other, perhaps oppositional, content and succeed in imposing their particular views as generally accepted meanings. The naturalization of particular interests into universals is what Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic power’, which he describes as ‘exercised in such an invisible way that people are unaware of its very existence, and those subject to it are the first among these, since the very exercise of this power depends on this lack of awareness’ (2014, p. 163). It operates through representing reality with a lexicon, modes of reasoning and metaphors (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 20) which with time come to be considered natural, with the effect of obscuring alternative views of the world. For example, when journalists described the financial crisis of 2007–2008 as a catastrophe, an accident or an epidemic, their metaphors reinforced the idea that crises are unpredictable events, thus promoting the neoliberal view that regulating markets is pointless (see Boulanger, 2016).

As an institution, the press contributes to the constitution of the social world, but it is itself constituted by ways of speaking that make sense of the world from a specific perspective. We therefore come to our press corpus intent on discovering how transparency was spoken of and by whom over t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Journalistic translation research goes global: theoretical and methodological considerations five years on
• 1 The translation of ‘transparency’ in the Canadian press: an inquiry into symbolic power
• 2 The role of stylistic features in constructing representations of Muslims and France in English online news about terrorism in France
• 3 The translation of tweets in Spanish digital newspapers
• 4 Evaluation in translation: a case study of Ukrainian opinion articles
• 5 (Re-)voicing Beijing’s discourse through self-referentiality: a corpus-based CDA analysis of government interpreters’ discursive mediation at China’s political press conferences (1998–2017)
• 6 Politeness strategies in translating Donald Trump’s offensive language into Arabic
• 7 Instances of translatorial action: a journalist as a translating reporter of speech
• 8 Translation in Serbian media discourse: the discursive strategy of argumentation as an adaptation technique
• Index