La Generación Atrapada: Spain's economic hardships in El País in English and PressEurop EN

Abstract

El País in English, the online website of Spain's major daily newspaper, publishes a selection of its articles for a worldwide English-speaking audience, and PressEurop, a recently created news site for mostly European Union affairs, also selects and publishes articles translated into English (and nine other languages). Both websites recently selected the same two human interest stories for translation from Spanish into English. Culture-specific items related to the national and regional education systems (FP superior) and to social welfare systems (ayudas) are analyzed, with a view of determining to what extent their cultural diversity remains visible in the target text. The study reveals that the culture-specific items were either translated inconsistently or generalized to such an extent that their importance dissipated in the target texts, though did not disappear entirely. In the context of news translation, which requires transediting in order to make texts culturally suitable for target audiences, such practices strike a balance between preserving cultural diversity and effectuating easy readability.