Call for papers
Culture and News Translation
special issue of Perspectives: Studies in Translatology
to be edited by Kyle Conway (University of North Dakota, USA)
This special issue will examine the role of culture in news translation.
Interest in news translation, for the most part, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It benefited from the sustained attention it received during the Translation in Global News initiative at the University of Warwick from 2004-2007, although occasional articles on the topic have appeared since the 1970s. In those early articles, scholars were concerned with how political relations between countries affected which stories traveled where. Scholars writing more recently have been more interested in how journalists’ institutional roles within a news organization shape how they construct their stories. In both cases, however, the analysis has been largely structural, concerned with newsroom organization and the political economy of news.
More recent research has raised questions about the role of culture in news translation. For example, in “Bringing the News Back Home” (Language and Intercultural Communication vol. 5, 2005), Susan Bassnett argues that journalists’ approach to translating, as they piece stories together from multiple sources, is inherently acculturating: “However and wherever a text originates, the objective is to represent that text to a specific audience, on their terms.” In Translation in Global News (2009), Esperanca Bielsa, along with Bassnett, expands on that argument by examining power in relation to culture.
In such cases, however, the nature of culture — what exactly it is — has gone largely unexamined, and many questions remain unasked. When journalists factor culture into their reporting, what is it exactly that they are taking into account? To what degree is culture a function of national, ethnic, religious, or linguistic identity? What happens when those categories come into contradiction with each other (for example, in situations where secularized national identities are challenged by the ostentatious display of religious symbols)? In such cases, what do notions of culture, as employed by journalists or by the academics studying them, bring to light or obscure from view? Is a more nuanced notion of culture possible, one that allows us to account for the effects of such contradictions?
The purpose of this issue will be to pose such questions and thereby to develop a more sophisticated understanding of culture and its role in news translation. Articles will explore what the term culture reveals and what it hides. The end goal will be to expand not only our understanding of culture as a theoretical concept but also our understanding of its role in journalists’ day-to-day practice (and the implications of that practice for news consumers’ conceptions of people they see as foreign or “other”). In this way, questions of practice will inform meta-theoretical questions related to the study of news translation, and vice versa.
Potential questions to address:
Related to journalists’ practice:
* How does culture help account for when news translation takes place and, more interestingly, when it does not?
* How do journalists operate in situations of cultural conflict? How do they orient themselves and their texts toward their readers (or listeners or viewers) when their readers are implicated in that conflict?
* How do cultural norms related to translation develop within the newsroom, and how do they shape the work of the journalist-translator?
* How do journalists account for the different culturally inflected, connotative meanings evoked by emotionally or politically charged words?
Related to scholarly study of news translation:
* How do notions of cultural translation supplement notions of linguistic translation? Is the distinction useful, or even tenable?
* What insight does the field of cultural studies, with its emphasis on culture and power, offer with respect to news translation?
* What is the relationship between news translation and ethnography, whose practitioners make similar claims about their ability to represent people belonging to foreign cultures?
Proposals addressing any aspects of culture and news translation (not just the suggestions listed above) are welcome.
Submissions:
Please send an abstract of 400-500 words to the guest editor, Kyle Conway (kyle.conway AT und.edu), as a pdf, odt, rtf, doc, or docx file by Sept. 1, 2013. Full articles (max. 7000 words) will be due in Aug. 2014. See full style guidelines.
Editor contact information:
Dr. Kyle Conway, University of North Dakota, USA, kyle.conway AT und.edu
Timeline:
Deadline for proposals: Sept. 2013
Decision on proposals: Jan. 2014
Deadline for full submissions: Aug. 2014 Distribution of reviewers’ comments: Jan. 2015 Deadline for final versions: Apr. 2015
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 