Interdisciplinary approaches to journalistic translation

Abstract

This article aims to survey some of the most salient publications on journalistic translation, with a particular focus on the research conducted within translation studies as an academic discipline. This review will also serve to establish a link with the work carried out by journalism scholars, notably the special issue of Journalism published in 2011. I will consider key terms such as “translation” and “transediting”, which have been used in journalism and translation studies, albeit often with different implications. The next section will discuss “gatekeeping”, a concept that has been very productive in the two disciplines, before discussing cultural translation as a defining feature of contemporary news translation, and the importance of conducting studies into ideology and translation. The final sections will briefly present some of the publications that have used ethnographic and historical approaches respectively.

Keywords

journalistic translation gatekeeping cultural translation ideology ethnographic approaches history of news translation

Introduction

In 2011, Journalism devoted an issue to journalistic translation. Although the title of the special issue was “Transcultural journalism and the politics of translation,” the articles delved into the role that translation plays in news production and dissemination on a very specific medium, the BBC, a corporation that has been traditionally regarded as the epitome of quality and, to a lesser extent, of objectivity. In their introduction, Gerd Baumann, Marie Gillespie, and Annabelle Sreberny, the editors, claimed that “Media Studies has been quite slow to wake up to issues of translation although there are some notable recent exceptions” (2011: 135). The exception they referred to was a monograph (Ang et al., 2008) dedicated to the Australian network SBS, a channel that has prided itself in translating foreign programmes, including news, for Australia’s diverse linguistic and cultural population. However, a look at the Ang, Hawkins, and Dabbousy’s book shows that the references made to translation are for more the most part an excuse to allow the authors to voice their views on the function of translation in mass media. For example, they claimed that subtitling is more democratic than dubbing (2008: 77) without providing any evidence. While such claims belong to the realm of opinions rather than facts or solid research, they do serve to establish a link with the more empirical work carried out by translation scholars since the 1990s. For example, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, translation specialists have analyzed the dubbing/subtitling dichotomy in audiovisual translation in Europe and have concluded that the former allows the commissioners or the translators themselves to alter the original message in ways that audiences will be unaware of, whereas subtitling enables the audience to compare the source and target languages as long as they are familiar with both. But translation studies research has also looked at more complex aspects of the two modes, including the cognitive effort required to process the content in the two types and the audience’s appreciation of the films being dubbed or subtitled (e.g., Perego et al., 2018). Be that as it may, Ang, Hawkins and Dabbousy’s book highlights the existence of professional and academic interests shared by communication, journalism, media and translation scholars.

However, these interests tend to be obscured by the definitions and/or application of some of the terms used in their respective disciplines. “Translation” is one of those words. In the introductory article to the special issue of Journalism, Baumann, Gillespie, and Sreberny attempted to define some of the terms used to refer to the various language transformations in news production involving translation. Thus, they provided a taxonomy that included “translating” and “transposing/transediting.” These were defined along these lines:

By (2) translating, we mean the techniques, crafts, and possibly grafts, of language-to-language transformations. Even the seemingly simplest linguistic transformations are evidently transformative in journalistic practice, be it by contents or by the discursive tone implied or smuggled in. (…)

By (3), transposing and trans-editing, we refer to implicit, and often silent, discursive re-intonations, while trans-editing emphasizes the simultaneity of translating and editing processes. The two, however, belong together, and go hand-in-glove at most instances. (2011: 137)

The definitions lacked clarity. Baumann, Gillespie, and Sreberny made a distinction between translation on the one hand, which, in their view, applies to literal renderings of source texts, and transposing and transediting on the other. As regards to the former, it was not clear what “discursive re-intonations” meant and how transediting differed from translation. In fact, translation scholars have used transediting as a synonym of journalistic or news translation in order to highlight its specificities since Karen Stetting introduced it in 1989. Some have challenged the need of such a term because, they argue, in translation studies as an academic discipline translation has come to signify transformations of source texts beyond literal renderings (Schäffner, 2012). The term, though, continues to be used to this day to refer to the peculiarities of news translation, which are believed to include a complete domestication of source texts to fit the interest of the target readership (see the discussion by Claire Scammell and Esperança Bielsa in this issue).

As regards the articles in the 2011 special issue, the terms proposed by Baumann, Gillespie, and Sreberny were used only sparingly by some of the contributors. In addition, there were important differences concerning the debate about the more general term “translation” itself. In some cases, the examination of translation practices was in fact very limited, which does not mean that the articles lack interest, as in the case of Bulic (2011) and Thiranagama (2011). For example, Thiranagama only used the verb “translate” in the sentence “their ability to translate their minority status within the BBC into a meaningful player within Sri Lanka” (2011: 164) where “translation” referred to very general transformations, not necessarily linguistic. The lack of precision in the use of the term in a special issue specifically devoted to “translation” falls in line with the findings of a study carried out by Valdeón (2020), who analyzed a corpus of almost two hundred journalism studies articles and showed that the use of the term “translation” varied greatly. This might partly explain the limited interaction between scholars of the two academic fields.

In this special issue, academics from different disciplines have joined forces to analyze translation practices from many complementary perspectives. These approaches have been used by translation scholars over the past two decades, albeit to different degrees. Theoretical issues, ethnographic approaches, and textual studies form the core of the publications available on journalistic translation. The next sections aim to present an overview of some of the research carried out in translation studies, some of it by journalists or former journalists who have found an academic home in translation studies. These sections will look at central issues, namely, gatekeeping and translation, cultural translation as opposed to linguistic translation, and ideological problems. I will then present the significant publications taking an ethnographic approach to the study of news translation and will highlight the need of historical studies that contribute to revealing the contribution of the translation practice to the birth of journalism. I will conclude with a brief discussion of the main challenge for interdisciplinary news translation research.

Gatekeeping

The gatekeeping function of translation has been noted by several researchers both in journalism and in translation studies. In fact, Baumann et al. (2011) stressed the link between conventional gatekeeping and translation practices as well as the relationship between these practices and power structures. In addition, Ang et al. (2008: 79) stated that the power of subtitlers was considered problematic because “they tended to act as gatekeepers,” as, in some cases, they selected the material to be subtitled because they felt the stories had to reflect well on the community. In other words, the gatekeeping function of translation started well before the translational process itself: first it was necessary to decide what to translate and then how it had to be translated.

Apart from these references to the 2011 special issue of Journalism and the work quoted by the editors, gatekeeping has been linked to the translation practice since at least the 1980s. In 1988, Japanese scholar A. Fujii produced a very brief paper discussing the relationship between gatekeeping and translation and posited that news translators perform four gatekeeping functions: controlling the quantity of the message, message transformation, message supplementation, and message reorganization. Nine years later, Finnish translator and scholar Erkka Vuorinen wrote an interesting piece in which he argued that some news translators act as internal gatekeepers. Drawing on the work of communication scholar Pamela Shoemaker, Vuorinen added that in news production, the translation practice could not be isolated from the institutional, social, and cultural environments in which it occurred. The article ended with an intriguing question: “But is it translation?” (1999: 170). This served the author to question the validity of expressions such as “mere translation,” which tends to be related to issues of prestige: journalists view their work as active and creative while they regard translation as passive or imitation that was discussed above. This also falls in line with the findings in Valdeón’s study (2020).

The gatekeeping function of translation has continued to attract the interest of scholars in the 21st century. In 2001, Kristian Hursti, a scholar with experience in the journalistic profession, examined how, in Finnish news companies, the gatekeeping process had a powerful effect on the Finnish language, both in terms of syntax and vocabulary. In 2012, Giorgios Floros analyzed the use of translation in the Cypriot context and concluded that Cypriot newspapers and the Cypriot Press and Information Office used translation as a political tool to disseminate national policy. This led Floros to call for a more ethical approach by journalists and news media that enable readers to have better access to information. In 2019, Matsushita posited that gatekeeping was primarily related to selection processes rather than to textual transformations. For the latter she opted for the term “transediting.”

Finally, Valdeón (2022) has recently carried out a study of the translation practices in the Spanish daily El País. The peculiarity of this study lies in the fact that it considers not the translations from other languages into the national language, as is the case of previous studies, but rather the rendering of local news into English for an international readership. Valdeón suggests the existence of two different gatekeeping levels. On the one hand, translation can function on a macrolevel, prior to the start of the translation process proper, when journalists or institutions make decisions on what to translate, and on a microlevel, once the translation process begins. This process is linked to the interests and ideological stance of the news corporation, which also seemed to be related to the ideological affinity between the new editorial board of El País and the new Spanish coalition government, formed by the Socialist Party and radical left Podemos.

In this special issue, Esmaeil Kalantari posits that the translation and gatekeeping pair have a part-whole relationship. In his theoretical paper, Kalantari draws on the work of journalism scholars Shoemaker and Vos to argue that translation is in fact one of the gates that information has to go through before it is finally published. Kalantari, who calls this the “translation gate,” posits that cooperation between translation practices and other gates starts at the very moment that the raw material used for news production includes foreign-language sources. However, not all news media operationalize translation in the same way: some companies may have clear translation policies, while in other environments, journalists can make their own decisions. In addition, he argues, different forces can determine the type of decisions made by the editor/translator. These can be organizational or go beyond the scope of the institutions themselves.

Cultural translation

Ang et al. (2008: 80) noted that translation does not necessarily need to be literal, or linguistic, but rather cultural, as shown in the translation of swearwords such as French “merde,” which, they stressed, may require a different word from “shit” because the effect of the two words for their respective audiences can differ. Ang, Hawkins, and Dabbousy, like other authors in communication studies (e.g., Hanusch, 2008), do not seem to realize that cultural translation is not new : it has already been discussed by translation scholars since the 1980s after the appearance of the so-called cultural turn in translation studies.

In the 2011 special issue of Journalism, Podkalicka mentioned the importance of cultural translation. In her article, she analyzed translation practices in the BBC by having recourse to three metaphors: “factory,” “dialogue,” and “network,” linking the activity to the Fordist factory. Podkalicka discussed issues of great relevance in news production such as audiences and audience participation, the divide between journalists and translators, and the relationship between the BBC and local networks. More importantly, Podkalicka highlighted the role of cultural translation as opposed to linguistic translation, more closely associated with literal translation. Podkalicka (2011: 147) added that this was nothing new in the journalistic practice. Nor was it in the translation practice. As mentioned, cultural translation has been central in translation studies since at least the late 1980s. Particularly relevant is the work of Susan Bassnett (2002), who has argued that cultural and audience relevance is more important than linguistic transfer. Bassnett’s publication follows her own line of research, initiated in the 1990s with Lefevere (1992); Bassnett and Lefevere (1998), and Theo Hermanns (1985), who also underscored the importance of cultural factors in the translation process. Not surprisingly, in the 21st century, Susan Bassnett also turned her attention to news translation. In 2005, she guest-edited a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication devoted to the topic. The collection, which included oft-quoted articles by professionals and academics (Bassnett, 2005; Orengo, 2005; Tsai, 2005), was the first special issue on news translation in a major international journal.

The significance of cultural translation in news production has been discussed by several scholars. Kyle Conway, a communications scholar who has collaborated with Susan Bassnett, has published widely on this issue. Conway (2015) highlights the role of cultural studies in the interpretation of texts in order to go beyond the apparent meaning of words and stresses the negotiation that takes place when source texts are translated. In his view, “symbolic culture, of which the news is one example, is the means by which a community produces and maintains its interpretative horizon” (2015: 526) and, consequently, when journalists translate, they need to take into account two sets of assumptions: those that shape how a text circulated in the original community and those of the target community (Conway, 2005: 230). In addition, Conway (2005) has considered the use of “equivalence” as deceptive because similar words can have divergent or distinct meanings in different languages, and their meaning can evolve over time. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin as well as enunciative linguistics, Conway adds that words have a dynamic nature that renders them problematic in translation. Conway (2008, 2010) has also studied the instability of politically charged words using a circuit model of culture that allows him to describe the dynamic and often contested meaning of words in source and target texts and the ways in which cultural resistance can hinder communication in news translation.

In this special issue, many of the contributors rely on cultural studies as well as other theoretical frameworks to study specific sets of texts. Particularly interesting in this sense is María José Hernández Guerrero’s article. Drawing on the work of Lefevere (1992) and Bielsa and Bassnett (2009), Hernández Guerrero examines the internet version of The Guardian and of Eldiario.es to analyze the cultural adaptations of English articles published in Spanish, and finds important differences that affect not only the linguistic transfer but also the choice of visual elements such as photographs. Although she acknowledges that this is due to the fact that the Spanish company does not have access to the pictures used in the English articles, Hernández Guerrero argues that the photographs selected for publication are likely to impact the narrative of the events portrayed in the texts. This, in turn, is likely to influence the reader’s interpretation of the story.

Ideological issues

The above points to the relevance of ideology in any discussion of news production, and, therefore, translation. Ideological issues have been of prime concern both for translation and communication scholars, as shown by the articles in the 2011 special issue of Journalism. For instance, Jaber and Baumann (2011) analyzed the Arabic service of the BBC using the transporting/translating/transposing/transmitting distinction proposed by Baumann et al. (2011) and underscored the role of the corporation in shaping the Arab media landscape and reaching Arab audiences. In addition to references to the technological issues involved in the transmission of the news, Jaber and Baumann made use of the naturalizing/exoticizing dichotomy widely discussed in translation studies and whose origin can be traced back to at least Roman authors. Although the validity of this dichotomy in news translation has been challenged by translation scholars (e.g., Bielsa and Bassnett, 2009: 10–11; Valdeón, 2023), this reference demonstrates the applicability of translation studies concepts in other domains. As regards to Jaber and Baumann’s article, this dichotomy allowed the authors to expound on the significance of word choices in English and their translation into other languages, including “terrorist,” “Islamic extremists,” “liberation army,” and “American invasion,” all of which may impact the readers’ reception of a specific news event.

Naturally, translation scholars working on news translation have also discussed the role that ideology plays in translated texts. These studies typically draw on frameworks such as critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Appraisal theory, two models that have been very productive in language-based studies. For example, Spiessens and Van Poucke (2016) used CDA to analyze the Russian representation of the Western coverage of the Crimean crisis in two Anglophone media, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, and two French ones, Le Monde and Le Figaro. Journalism scholars have also turned to CDA models in their own work, as shown by some of the articles published in Journalism. To mention two examples, Maeseele has studied media discourses on food (2013), and Solman and Henderson have analyzed flood discourses (2018). This points to the availability of theoretical frameworks that can be successfully used in interdisciplinary approaches.

On the other hand, translation scholar Mona Baker (2006) has drawn on sociological theories to propose an analysis of media texts and their translation that include framing analysis. Baker claims that framing can be carried out through four strategies: temporal and spatial framing, selective appropriation, framing by labelling, and repositioning of the participants. Her model has been adopted by other translation scholars for the study of ideology, including Qin and Zhang (2018) and Valdeón (2014). Sue-Ann Harding has also resorted to narrative theory to explore a Russian theme: the wars in Chechnya. In a series of articles (e.g., Harding, 2011, 2012), Harding has studied the construction of narratives regarding the Beslan hostage crisis and the subsequent conflict in the area as well as their translation in the West.

In this special issue, Yuan Ping tackles the controversies surrounding reporting of the 2014 Hong Kong protests in news media in China, the UK, and the US. Combining critical discourse analysis and framing analysis (as suggested by Baker), his corpus-based study demonstrates that Reference News, a Chinese official news company, adopts a basically government-centered approach, BBC Chinese resorts to social framing while the approach in the New York Times appears to rely more on individualistic framing. Ping also finds that the strategies used differ: Reference News tends to rely on paratextual elements such as pictures and headlines to reframe news events.

For her part, Angela Kamyanets applies a textual analysis of news texts posted by the Russian and Ukrainian editions of the BBC. Kamyanets, who applies a critical discourse approach to the analysis of the articles, demonstrates that the reframing strategies vary considerably in the two versions. Thus, while the articles posted on the Ukrainian site remain closer to the English originals, the Russian texts are characterized by a greater number of omissions and additions that seem to portray Russia in a less negative way, perhaps in an attempt to sound less antagonistic vis-a-vis the intended readership.

Finally, Ali Jalalian Daghigh combines critical discourse analysis with actor-network theory to investigate the interaction between human and non-human actants in Iranian news agencies. Bruno Latour’s actor-network model, used in social theory to examine the relationship between human and non-human forces affecting action in social life, has recently been applied to the study of news translation in community radios in South Africa (van Rooyen, 2019). Van Rooyen, a journalist and a translation scholar, reveals that translation does not merely play a secondary role in radio news production, but rather a prominent position on all levels of the production process giving voice to the voiceless in a country with 11 official languages. As for Daghigh’s article, it shows that news writing in Iran relies on both human and non-human actants to meet the requirements of the Iranian government, including the censorship of any critical views of the ruling party and of Iran’s political regime, while portraying the West as the enemy.

Ethnographic approaches and reception studies

While most studies on the role of translation in news production have focused on source texts (typically English) and their versions in a variety of target languages, a few scholars have gained access to and managed to study the newsroom. This approach comprises the observation of the work carried out in newsrooms as well as interviews with journalists. In the 2011 special issue of Journalism, Jaber and Baumann (2011: 177) underscored the importance of the examination of in-house routines to complement textual analysis. Observations of this type, they claimed, serve to consider the “perceived needs and structurations of the audience,” a point that has been made by translation scholars, who have pointed out the difficulties of carrying out observation of news production routines. This results from a certain mistrust of having potential observers in the newsroom. Jaber and Baumann coincide with translation scholars that reception studies are necessary, as the audience’s critical comments on the reporting of specific news events demonstrate. While on the whole, their study is for the most part impressionistic, as it tries to cover too much ground using several methodological approaches, it emphasizes the relationship between communication and translation studies and the need for interdisciplinary and collaborative studies. In the same special issue, Thiranagama (2011), a specialist in anthropology, reported on the findings of her observations of and interviews with the staff of the BBC Tamil and BBC Sinhala services, and concluded that the BBC was far from an objective global observer. On the contrary, the two services were influenced by the journalists’ own perception of Sri Lanka and, thus, they became ethnicized services.

As indicated, researchers working in translation and language studies have also reported on the ins and outs of newsrooms. Perrin (2012), a former journalist himself, studied newsrooms in Geneva and showed that journalists use language creatively when translating from a foreign language and that their decisions are affected by both individual and institutional stances. Perrin used the term “entextualization” in a similar way as translation scholars have used “recontextualization” (e.g., Kang, 2007; House, 2016: 64–66). For their part, Bielsa and Bassnett (2009) relied on semi-structured interviews and observation in their study of news translation practices at Agence France Press, Reuters, and Inter Press. Bielsa and Bassnett quoted some of the views of news writers regarding translation. Journalists believe that a translator’s work has to be invisible because, unlike the work of the editor, it is not clear what translators do (2009: 93). Lucile Davier has also carried out newsroom observation and conducted semi-structured interviews in much of her research. For instance, she studied the Agence France Press and the ATS (Agence télégraphique Suisse) in Geneva to evaluate the consequences that a lack of awareness of the plurilingualism process can cause in the final product (Davier, 2014).

In this special issue, two contributions are based on ethnographic approaches to news production and translation. Astrid Vandendaele, Olivier Standaert, and Catherine Bouko, three communication researchers working in the Netherlands (Vandendaele) and Belgium (Standaert and Bouko), studied the case of Belgium, where Dutch-speaking journalists resort to foreign-language skills (particularly English and French) to gather information despite the fact that at a production level, foreign-language skills are not considered relevant. In line with this specific environment, translation scholar and former journalist Luc van Doorslaer (2009, 2010, 2012), who has published extensively on the importance of foreign languages in the Flemish newsroom, has used the portmanteau word “journalator” to refer to the central role that translation plays in news gathering and dissemination (van Doorslaer, 2012). For their article, Vandendaele, Standaert, and Bouko conducted semi-structured interviews with both francophone and Dutch-speaking journalists and found that although foreign-language proficiency poses problems (and, in the highly politicized Belgian environment, embarrassment to some extent), translation is an integral part of the news production process, thus concurring with Valdeón (2022) that it has a gatekeeping function.

For her part, Alicia Wright presents the findings of in-depth interviews with Indian journalists who, in turn, use interviews in their work. Typically, these interviews take place in Hindi and then have to be rendered into English. The translational situation in this context differs considerable from the Belgian situation, where, despite the political implications of the language conflict, cultural differences are less marked than in the Indian case. Wright examines the function of the texts, or skopos as has been termed in translation studies, and demonstrates that the decisions made by the journalists can have an important impact on the resulting texts and, therefore, on the audience’s reception. For her part, María José Hernández Guerrero combines textual analysis with a semi-standardized interview with the head of the international section of Eldiario.es. This serves Hernández Guerrero to verify and, most importantly, explain the findings of her analysis.

In addition to ethnographic approaches that observe the work of professionals (translators, journalists, transeditors, journalators…), translation and journalism scholars also share an interest in how texts are received by target audiences. In this issue, Claire Scammell and Esperança Bielsa examine the concept of cosmopolitanism in relation to cultural translation by comparing readers’ responses to news texts that have been domesticated or heavily adapted to meet the expected norms of the target readership on the one hand with those of readers of texts that have undergone a more “foreignized” approach on the other. Scammell and Bielsa stress that the latter are more successful in facilitating cross-cultural engagement. Reception studies such as this one show another example of common ground where translation and journalism scholars could collaborate.

Historical studies on the interface between translation and journalism

The preceding sections have highlighted the common interests of translation and communication/journalism studies. Historically, the connection between the two practices can be traced back to the emergence of journalism in the early modern period (Valdeón, 2020), as the news circulated across Europe via translation. Regardless of the language of production, news pamphlets such as corantos, avvisi, gazettes, and relaciones were translated for foreign readerships. In England, for example, the editors of these early newspapers used translation to underscore the objectivity of the articles, even though the texts often underwent transformations of various types that altered the information contained in the original articles (Dooley, 2010). Translation was indeed crucial in news centers such as Antwerp and Amsterdam, where dozens of papers were produced in different languages and then distributed across the continent. 140 newspapers were published in Amsterdam alone in Dutch, English, French, and other languages (Rantanen, 2007: 849). Later, in the 19th century, the first news agencies were also linked to translation: Havas, Reuters, and Wolff were translation agencies or were managed by translators. Although the history of translation is indeed full of examples of the relationship between translation and journalism, the connection between the two practices gradually became invisible as the latter was professionalized and translators occupied a secondary position in the news production chain. However, an increasing interest on the part of translation scholars and the references in the work of journalism academics has produced relevant publications such as those by Dooley (2010) and Espejo (2016).

In this special issue, Marcos Rodríguez-Espinosa takes a historical approach in his examination of the role of translators during the Spanish Civil War. Rodríguez-Espinosa’s article relates to the work of other translation and, notably, journalism scholars, who have published on the role of interpreters or fixers in conflict zones. For example, Palmer (2008) has studied the use of fixers in contemporary journalism and posits that journalists attach great importance to accuracy and faithfulness because they are not normally familiar with local languages. Rodríguez-Espinosa analyzes the work of fixers during the Spanish conflict, but also of other language mediators, including those working for the censorship bureaus created by both the Francoist and Republican Press Offices. In addition, his article relates to issues of ideology and propaganda, which other contributors to this special issue have examine from a textual perspective.

Further research exploring the historical connections between translation and journalism will provide additional insights into how the former was used as a censorship tool in news production in other regimes and periods.

Concluding remarks

This introductory article has aimed to highlight the close relationship between translation and journalism as professional practices and academic disciplines. However, this common ground has not translated into a close cooperation between the latter. In recent years, there have been some notable attempts to bridge the academic gap between them though. One of them was the 2011 special issue of Journalism that focused on the role of translation in the foreign-language services of the BBC. The British corporation has continued to attract much scholarly interest over the years, including the use of translation for the production of its news output. Some of the articles in this special issue (specificially those authored by Yuan Ping and Angela Kamianets) illustrate this interest.

Another noteworthy example is Juliane House and Jens Loenhoff’s contribution to the book entitled Border Crossings (Gambier and van Doorslaer, 2016). The book aimed at setting up a dialogue between a translation scholar and one belonging to another disciplines. House and Loenhoff, who focused on translation and communication in a chapter with a suggestive subtitle (“a special relationship”), organized their contribution as a semi-structured dialogue around a number of key headings. Although House and Loenhoff (2016) raised important issues, they failed to effectively enter a dialogue as each focused on the way in which certain were perceived in their own discipline. In addition, the section on common research interests merely touched upon each other’s discipline. In the case of Juliane House, she was primarily concerned with her own (otherwise interesting) contributions to the field of translation studies.

To some extent, this special issue aims to consolidate a “special relationship” that has continued to grow in the past few years. For example, Journalism has published a handful of papers that study journalistic translation, for example, Vietnamese policies concerning the translation of news texts for an international audience (van Leeuwen, 2006), the translation of attribution in South Korea (Hong, 2021), and the representation of the Burundi 2015 crisis in Western media via translation (Williamson Sinalo, 2022). This special issue showcases the interdisciplinary nature of translation studies as the articles by translation scholars demonstrate, but also the growing interest in translation by authors working in other disciplines (Astrid Vandendaele, Olivier Standaert, Catherine Bouko, Alice Wright, and Esperança Bielsa). It also serves as a reminder of the fact that many of the translation scholars whose work focuses on news translation have a journalistic background: they worked (or continue to work) as journalists (e.g., Luc van Doorslaer in Belgium, Denise Filmer in the UK, Claire Tsai in Taiwan, Kayo Matsushita in Japan, and Marlie van Rooyen in South Africa).

Finally, it also exemplifies the potential of translation and journalism studies for the various types of academic interaction that Gambier and van Doorslaer (2016: 8–9) distinguished in the introduction to Border Crossings: cross-disciplinarity (or the use of a concept or term in two or more disciplines), multi-disciplinarity (or a study that can be relevant to several disciplines), and trans-disciplinarity (or the synergy existing between two or more disciplines), all of which can be subsumed by the more widely used “interdisciplinarity” that this issue has attempted to promote.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Roberto A. Valdeón is professor in English Studies and translation at the University of Oviedo, Spain, honorary professor at South China Business College (SCBC), Guangzhou, China, and research associate at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is a member of Academia Europaea, editor-in-chief of Perspectives Studies in Translation Theory and Practice and general editor of the Benjamins Translation Library.

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