News Translation Research Articles

Ideological Manipulation in Aljazeera Live News Interpretation: A Normative Study

Translation and Interpretation has long been scrutinised from the linguistic, social, and cultural perspectives, with a recent emphasis on the impact of social, cultural, and ideological factors on translation. Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), pioneered by Gideon Toury, prioritise understanding translations within social and cultural contexts rather than prescribing norms. Political news translation and interpretation, particularly in conflict contexts, underscores the sensitive and controversial nature of translation decisions as they are influenced by political and ideological stances. This study investigates the dominant norms shaping the interpretating of international news on Al-Jazeera’s Live Channel. Through qualitative content analysis guided by Toury’s framework, the prevailing interpreting norms were identified. Analyses revealed the dominance of target-oriented norms in Al-Jazeera’s interpreters, reflecting adherence to the target culture's social, cultural, and ideological norms. The study contributes to our understanding of interpreting as a socially-embedded practice and its implications for political discourse and ideological representation.

Linguistic Features and Translation of English Sports News

Abstract Sports, as one symbol of social civilization, are indispensable to our social and cultural life. Nowadays, with the development of society and the economy, sports news occupies a significant place in our daily lives and has aroused people’s attention. English sports news, as a kind of special news style, has the characteristics of news style but also presents its unique language features. This paper tries to analyze the linguistic features of English sports news with vivid examples of vocabulary and sentences. It includes five parts. The first part introduces the origin and development of English sports news. The second is the literature review, which introduces previous studies on English Sports News and its translation. Then, the third and fourth parts study the linguistic features and translation of English sports news with vivid examples. Lastly, the fifth part is the conclusion, which summarizes the linguistic features of English Sports News and gives several translation principles. For instance: faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance; literal translation, and free translation. Keywords: English sports news; linguistic features; translation methods

The Application of Zwart’s Shift Model to the English-Arabic Translation of Technology News

The present research paper discusses the applicability of Zwart’s “Comparative–Descriptive Model of Translation Shifts” (1984) to translating Sci-Tech news from English into Arabic. This comprehensive model primarily investigates the translation shifts occurring in literary discourse. To the best of the reCsearcher’s knowledge, very few attempts have been made to apply this shift analysis-based model to the translation of other types of discourse. The paper applies this model to translating scientific discourse, particularly technology news, on several reliable news websites, such as BBC and CNBC. English news on the English websites (ST) and the Arabic translation (TT) on these websites are used as data for the comparative and descriptive analysis. Zwart’s comparative model describes the translation shifts on the microstructural level by comparing the architranseme and the SL and TL transoms. The descriptive model provides insights into the shifts on the macrostructural level. The paper concludes that shifts occurring in the translation of Sci-Tech news can be best described, analysed, and categorised within Zwart’s comparative model. It also concludes that shifts on the microstructural level do not necessarily lead to a noticeable macrostructural change in the primary language metafunctions (interpersonal, ideational, and textual) as in the translation of literary works. Syntactic shifts may, however, result in a macrostructural change of the textual metafunction, which alters the propositional content in some instances.

“Telling China’s story well”? Tifa, translation, and discursive power in the Quotidiano del Popolo

ABSTRACT Examining China’s growing efforts to affirm its ‘discoursive power’ (话语权) in the Euro-Mediterranean region, this paper presents a case study of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) communication of its ‘external publicity’ (对外宣传) via news translation. The study focuses on translation strategies of the Italian version (Quotidiano del Popolo) of the official Party newspaper 人民日报 to investigate the implications and effects of translation shifts involving tifa (提法, political formulations and fixed expressions). A qualitative textual analysis applied the Descriptive Translation three-stage methodology to a corpus of articles on the Beijing 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Games, with reference to ‘constraint’ and ‘relation’ in translation. Understatement, omission, and indirect translation were identified as translation shifts in the corpus, suggesting ideological tensions behind most such shifts. While the first two modes help downplay China’s geo-political ambition, the last results in ineffective translation that can obstruct the intended political message, hindering the ability to ‘tell China’s story well’ (讲好中国故事). This study seeks to elucidate the complexity and political intricacies of ‘correctly’ receiving and replicating the Chinese political message in a foreign language other than English.

Artificial Intelligence Applications in English News Translation: Strategies and Research

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is significantly transforming the field of translation, especially in English news translation. This paper aims to explore the application strategies of AI in English news translation and its current research status. First, it introduces the basic concepts of AI and machine translation, reviews the development history of machine translation technology, and analyzes the unique requirements of news translation. Then, it discusses key application strategies of AI in news translation, including data collection and processing, model selection and training, translation quality assessment, and real-time translation technology. Additionally, the paper analyzes major challenges in AI applications, such as translation accuracy, cultural and contextual understanding, and data privacy and security, and proposes corresponding solutions. Finally, it explores future development trends in AI translation technology, including technological advancements, application expansion, and ethical and societal impacts. This paper aims to provide comprehensive references and in-depth insights for researchers in related fields.

Transediting the terms used for describing the US dollar in Arabic and English news websites: a triangulational study of transediting strategies adopted in four channels

News translation, which is often known as news transediting, which is concerned with the translation of materials for print and/or online mass media, has long stimulated interest within the field of translation studies. The present paper explores the strategies of transediting the terms used for describing the US dollar in the websites of four news channels, namely: Alarabiya, Aljazeera, BBC and CNN between Arabic and English from the first of July 2022 to the thirty-first of December 2022. The paper conducts triangulational analysis to identify the type and frequency of the transediting strategies used in each channel, present how certain examples of each strategy are adopted and demonstrate the similarities and differences in the type and frequency of the transediting strategies employed between the channels. The paper argues that the choice of the transediting strategy is based on the type of audience, context, the channel’s policy and the type of information intended for delivery. This paper offers a baseline for exploring the strategies of transediting the terms used for describing the US dollar in both Arabic and English news websites of the aforementioned channels, which may have implications for exploring other transediting strategies used in other news websites of different channels broadcast in different languages.

News Translation as Media Work in Agency Journalism? Evidence from United News of India Urdu

ABSTRACT Western liberal media theories often neglect to recognize “news translation” as one of the journalistic practices. This paper problematizes this dominant understanding of journalistic practice and expands the Bourdieusian media sociology project beyond western media systems by applying it to Indian agency journalism. A case study of the United News of India Urdu (UNIU) serves as the basis for this examination, drawing on an ethnography of news production practices, and supplemented with in-depth interviews conducted with Muslim journalists from 2018 to 2020 across four major Indian cities. Through this investigation, the paper asserts that “news translation” is indeed a vital but contested component of media work within the sphere of Indian-language journalism. The paper uses “media work” as a key concept to demonstrate that UNIU’s journalists are anchored in the field of journalism, as is evidenced by their institutional-cum-organizational location and their application of the elements of journalistic practice to their work.

Translating in and out of East Asian cultures: focus on Chinese and Korean

ABSTRACT This introductory article aims to present an overview of the contribution that East Asian scholars have made to Translation Studies as a field of enquiry. Apart from some contributions from countries such as Thailand and Vietnam, most of the publications of the last four decades involve Chinese, Korean, and Japanese themes and are authored by scholars from these areas or focused on the languages and cultures of China, Korea and Japan. The article considers the publications on audiovisual as well as literary and news translation, highlighting articles, book chapters and monographs that have delved into translations involving East Asian languages, notably Chinese, Korean and Japanese. The final section introduces the selection of papers that conform this thematic issue.

A Socio-Cognitive Account of Ideological Manipulation in Chinese Translation of Political Opinion Articles

ABSTRACT In the realm of politics and media, particularly in situations of conflict, translation plays a critical role in resisting the discourse of news texts towards the socio-political correctness of the target society. Translation researchers have long focused on ideological manipulation and related techniques, notably in the translation of political news, linking ideologically motivated translation techniques to their macro functions (socio-political factors) via critical discursive approaches, but rarely have they examined what mediates these techniques and the social context. The main aim of the present study is to provide a socio-cognitive account of such ideological manipulations based on van Dijk’s notion of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The corpus of the study consists of opinion articles covering the Ukrainian conflict, originally published by American news institutions, and their corresponding Chinese translations in Chinese newspapers. Documented and supported by several examples, the findings suggest that the manipulations are mainly motivated by the polarization of “US” and “THEM”.

Automatic News Summarization using Web Scraping

In an era of information overload, accessing relevant news content efficiently is crucial. However, language barriers often hinder users from accessing news articles in languages they understand. To address this challenge, we propose an automatic news summarization and translation system. This system aggregates news articles from multiple URLs, summarizes them into concise summaries, and translates the summaries into the user's preferred language. By leveraging web scraping, natural language processing, and translation integration techniques, our system aims to provide users with access to relevant news content in their preferred language, thereby overcoming language barriers and fostering global connectivity. Keywords— automatic news summarization, translation integration, web scraping, natural language processing, language barriers, information accessibility, global connectivity, user preferences, multilingual content, web-based news aggregation

The Role of News Translation in Portraying the Islamist Discourse in News Reports Produced (BBC & Al Arabiya)

The Role of News Translation in Portraying the Islamist Discourse in News Reports Produced (BBC & Al Arabiya)

Application of ELAN in Human-Machine Mutual Translation of English for the News

The translation of English news means the process of converting news articles published in English into another language. These articles may also be referred to as English news. This process comprises understanding the substance of the source article and accurately translating its tone and intent into the target language. A human translator or machine translation software can be used to perform the translation manually. In the disciplines of software globalization and technological translation, the Human-Machine Mutual Translation technique has grown significantly with the advancement of civilization and the quickening growth of research and innovation. Because of this practical need, translators have begun to focus more on machine translation and have conducted some productive research in this area. As a result, we suggested the EUDICO Linguistic Annotator (ELAN) in Human-Machine mutual translation of English for the news. EUDICO stands for European Distributed Corpora Project. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics created the EUDICO Linguistic Annotator as a software program for the linguistic annotation of language data. For this study, the English news dataset was used. The data were pre-processed by using normalization. The results were evaluated using performance metrics such as translation quality, precision, BLEU, recall, and computation time. The findings show that the recommended procedure provides an accurate translation of English news when compared to previously used methods. The results demonstrated that translation quality and computation time of proposed model are 95% and 60s respectively.

(Re)framing online news through paratexts: a multisemiotic analysis of The New York Times in Chinese

ABSTRACT This study employs a multisemiotic approach to analyse various paratextual framing devices in online news texts, including news headlines, photographs and captions, as well as section names. Translated news articles about the 2014 Hong Kong protests were collected from the Chinese-language website of The New York Times (NYT) published between 28 September and 16 December 2014 and their original versions from its English website. The study finds that the Chinese edition mainly frames the events covered in the articles through paratextual rather than textual elements and, through those paratextual elements, a slightly different social reality to their English version for the events was (re)framed. This study underscores the influential role of paratextual devices in news translation, demonstrating how they can subtly shift the framing of events and potentially influence public perception.

Exploring Pragmatic Adaptation in Television News Translation: A Case Study of Moroccan National TV

The study explores pragmatic adaptation in translating foreign TV news, focusing on Moroccan National TV practices. Translation connects cultures, necessitating an understanding of pragmatics for effective communication. Investigating this complex process is crucial to ensure that translated discourse resonates with the target audience. Foreign news, following Baker's multifunctional approach, seeks to influence audiences, demanding meticulous adaptation of linguistic nuances by translators. The study examines three axes: TV news linguistic style, translation techniques, and their efficacy. Data from translated foreign news aired on Moroccan National TV in Arabic will be analyzed, focusing on language style and register. Pragmatic adaptations in TV news translation will be scrutinized, evaluating effectiveness in fidelity to the source. A qualitative approach will be used, aligning with the study's focus on pragmatic adaptation techniques. Primary sources include culturally rich English news broadcasts translated into Arabic by Moroccan National TV translators, supplemented by al-Oula TV news topics. Through this investigation, the study aims to deepen understanding of translating foreign TV news dynamics and illuminate pragmatic adaptations in the Moroccan context.

Journalism and Translation: Practices, Strategies, and Values in News Agencies

Information transmitted between cultures through news agencies, are not only translated in meaning between languages, but are also reconfigured, edited, synthes ized and transformed for the consumption of a new group of readers. In the world of global media, the definition of translation is being challenged and the boundaries of what we might call translation have been reformulated. By investigating mechanisms of news translation, we seek through our research paper to collect a number of foundations proposed by many greatest thinkers in this field. Today, the so-called global communication strategies, does exist. Studies of globalization, media studies, sociology and translation have vast areas of common interest. The question of global information flows is related to the ways in which the media build news stories, and the transmission of these laters often involves moving, not only across space, but also across linguistic and cultural boundaries, which makes the collision between international media and translation, occurs.

Indirect translation explained

Although largely ignored by earlier researchers or examined only to a limited extent, indirect translation—translation from or for a translation—has come to be recognized as a noteworthy area, which can open a wide field for researchers. It would be fair to assert that it has experienced a significant upswing in research attention in the past few years with the publication of three special issues in the journal Target (Pięta et al., 2022), Translation Studies (Rosa et al., 2017), Perspectives (Davier et al., 2023) and also encyclopedic entries and books (Andre, 2020; Hadley, 2023; Pięta, 2021) and numerous research articles. Despite all efforts so far, “research on indirect translation [is] lagging so far behind other subfields that focus on adjacent phenomena (e.g. retranslation or self-translation […])” (Davier et al., 2023, p. 824). Therefore, the volume under review will considerably contribute to the extant literature. This book, co-authored by renowned scholars of indirect translation and in an accessible style, explores indirect translation across various domains, such as news translation, interpreting, and audiovisual translation, from both theoretical and practical perspectives. As such, it expands beyond the traditional focus on written and literary translation (Pięta et al., 2023). Packed with practical exercises, helpful tips, and effective solutions for learners, this volume is an essential read for translator trainers, trainees, scholars, and researchers of indirect translation. The book comprises seven core chapters, along with an introduction and a conclusion. Each chapter presents learning outcomes and suggests thought-provoking activities, which aim to enhance reader engagement with the text. The book also contains a glossary, which defines key terms for readers.

A Study on Cultural Default and Compensation in C-E Translation of Soft News from the Perspective of Relevance Theory: A Case Study of China Daily in 2022

Cultural default and compensation play an important role not only in literary translation, but also in many non-literary translation fields, including news translation. Under the guidance of relevance theory, this paper takes the bilingual soft news of China Daily as the materials adopts the literature method and case analysis method to examine the cultural defaults in the translation process of soft news, and finds out the appropriate compensation strategies. Through research, it is found that the most common cultural defaults in soft news are linguistic cultural defaults, followed by social cultural defaults, material cultural defaults, ecological cultural defaults and religious cultural defaults. In addition, reconstruction, transliteration and transplantation are common compensation strategies in translation, which need to be adjusted flexibly according to translation requirements. This study is expected to provide some reference for the translation of soft news and attract more scholars’ attention to cultural default and compensation in soft news translation, so as to improve the translation quality of soft news.

A Study on News Translation of The Economist from the Perspective of Skopos Theory

Twenty-one century has seen a great progress in Chinese technological development in all walks of life, including space fight, med-ical science and physical economy. From previous tons of English-to-Chinese translations to urgent Chinese-to-English translations in terms of Chinese culture. With the improvement of translating theories, the sector is well-performed. It is imperative to write down-to-earth reports in critical thinking. Why skopos theory is appropriate for news translation has been explained. For problems in news in 2023, the points has been solved with translation methods. The goal of the thesis is to provide new solutions when facing at problems in translating, and to analyze examples in order to solve the points.

Distance and closeness in translated global news coverage: bilingual representations of culture-bound themes from Bolivia to the world

ABSTRACT Global news agencies are major sources of information about events often happening far away from their international audiences; information that rapidly transcends geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. There is a twofold purpose to the analysis in this study of bilingual feature stories dealing with the representation of faith in Bolivia, published by the news agencies Associated Press, Agencia EFE, and Reuters in Spanish and English. First, it implements an analytical framework to characterize bilingual news coverage by describing types of transcultural transfers, singling out the translation techniques applied, and bringing into focus how the culture-bound elements were rendered. Second, the contrastive textual analysis prompts a methodological discussion on the potential of studying translation distance and closeness in multilingual news production from a non-mainstream locale. Results point to close renditions that may not be considered a typical practice in news translation, yet are ostensibly purposeful both from a translational and from a journalistic perspective. Since journalism and translation coexist in multilingual newsrooms, where the latter often goes unacknowledged, this article ultimately attempts to reveal the role of translation in producing international news about distant realities, such as Bolivia, where cultural specificities are ubiquitous.

MODULATION OF MOVING CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS IN VIETNAMESE TRANSLATION IN ECONOMIC DISCOURSE

The emergence of Cognitive Linguistics (CL) and the introduction of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have provided a novel lens through which metaphor translation can be examined. The persistent concern of translation practice remains the effective transmission of meaning and messages. To achieve this objective, modulation may be needed to effectively communicate the intended information. This sequential mixed method study investigates the translation of metaphoric expressions rooted in the conceptual metaphor “ECONOMIC CHANGES ARE WAYS OF MOVING” in English and Vietnamese economic press releases. The findings reveal that a significant number of metaphoric expressions are retained in translation with minimal alterations, suggesting a high degree of cross-linguistic conceptual coherence concerning economic changes. However, occasional modifications are observed, highlighting the potential influence of modulations on the conceptualization of economic events and the underlying conceptual metaphors within the Vietnamese economic context. This study contributes to providing insights into the dynamic interplay between language and conceptualization in the translation of economic news.