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Translating the news. A globally relevant field for applied linguistics research

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ISSUES IN BILINGUALISM/
MULTILINGUALISM
 CHAPTER TWENTY

TRANSLATING THE NEWS:

A GLOBALLY RELEVANT FIELD FOR APPLIED
LINGUISTICS RESEARCH

DANIEL PERRIN
AND MAUREEN EHRENSBERGER-DOW

Abstract
Globalization and media convergence have given rise to novel forms of
news networks and markets in various languages all over the world; a
diversity that poses increasing challenges for journalists and editors of
foreign news. Although not educated as professional translators,
journalists constantly work between languages during text production in
the newsroom and therefore produce real life multilingualism. The
question of interest in this chapter is what journalists do when their source
materials are in different languages from the target language of their
outgoing texts. More specifically, we explore whether institutionalized
translation policies guide journalistic practices in such circumstances or
whether journalists develop and rely on their own translation strategies.
The methodology applied combines newsroom ethnography with in-depth
analysis of writing processes, workplace conversations and interviews
with media management. In this chapter, we draw on data from four
television newsrooms in Switzerland, a highly multilingual country. Our
findings indicate that translation is involved in every aspect of news
production, including how journalists handle their source materials, their
target texts, and their social environment. However, translation in the
newsroom is based primarily on individuals’ implicit and tacit knowledge,
not on explicit organizational knowledge. We conclude by suggesting how
insights from this research can be generalized and contribute to increasing
organizational knowledge of media companies.
 Translating the News 353

Introduction
Until recently, there has been relatively little examination of the
translation practices and strategies of people who have no background or
formal training in translation but regularly work between languages and
therefore produce real life multilingualism (for recent insights into crowd
sourcing and lay translation see Susam-Sarajeva & Perez-Gonzales, 2012).
From research in legal and medical settings, we know that there can be
serious risks associated with engaging untrained personnel to perform
public service interpreting (e.g., Bischoff & Dahinden, 2008; Corsellis,
2008; de Pedro Ricoy, Perez, & Wilson, 2009). Working in socially
powerful positions between languages without the professional preparation
to do so, journalists are increasingly exposed to similar expectations.
With media convergence and glocalization, an increasing amount of
material coming into newsrooms originates from sources other than
established news agencies. Recorded by amateurs or local media, useful
source material such as video bites can contain utterances from all over the
world in various languages. However, little research has been carried out
in the area of working between languages during text production in the
newsroom (for individual case studies see Tsai, 2005; Darwish, 2009). In
the course of such text production–or reproduction–source texts and other
types of source materials are used in collaborative processes by journalists
to produce target texts they consider appropriate for their audiences. The
choice of which material to include and how to do so in reporting local
news globally or global news locally can be related to the linguistic
resources available to the journalists and editors involved. This chapter
addresses the specific question of how Swiss television journalists cope
with linguistic diversity in their news production processes, focusing on
quotes in languages they may not be familiar with or can hardly understand.

Background: Text Production in the Newsroom

A basic practice in the newsroom is text reproduction. Source texts and
other types of source materials are used in collaborative text production
processes by journalists to produce target texts appropriate for their
audiences. Their psychobiographies (Layder, 1997; Perrin, 2012),
including language education that can result in increased language
awareness, social settings such as newsroom facilities, and contextual
resources such as global access to news sources, influence their decisions
(see Figure 20-1). In increasingly convergent media in a globalized
environment (Singer, 2009), the audience can have direct access to
354 Chapter Twenty

journalists’ sources as well, or they can function as sources themselves by

providing input to multi-layered collaborative text production processes.

Figure 20-1: Text reproduction as a basic practice in the newsroom (Jakobs &
Perrin, 2008, p. 364).

On analogy to current definitions of writing strategies (cf. Perrin, 2003;

Perrin & Ehrensberger-Dow, 2006), journalists’ translation strategies are
defined here as the reinforced, conscious, and therefore articulable ideas of
how decisions are to be made during the act of translating so that the
process or text product has a great probability of fulfilling the intended
function (cf. Jääskeläinen, 2007, 2009). Journalists’ translation strategies
are assumed to be related to their linguistic awareness, which we define as
the language users’ individually-determined, socially-influenced, and
socially-formative sensibility for and consciousness of the interrelations
between language, language use, and the situation the language is used in
(see also Ehrensberger-Dow & Perrin, 2009; Jessner, 2006; Perrin &
Ehrensberger-Dow, 2008). By contrast, journalists’ practices are what they
actually do more or less consciously.
Investigating the question of how journalists deal with linguistic
diversity requires a transdisciplinary approach, which transgresses “both
the boundaries between scientific disciplines and the boundaries between
academic research and practice” (Hollaender, Loibl, & Wilts, 2008, p.
385). The focus of interest here is the relation of the situated linguistic
activities of writing and translating with the powers and constraints of the
social structures involved. Our research draws on integrative social theory,
and specifically on the linguistically-relevant realist social theory (Carter
& Sealey, 2000; Sealey & Carter, 2004; Sealey, 2007), which in turn is
 Translating the News 355

based on domain theory (Archer, 1995; Layder, 1997, 1998). Domain

theory clearly distinguishes among three layers of context or structures
interacting with situated activities, such as language use in general or
newswriting and translating in particular. These layers are: the older and
therefore quite immovable contextual resources, such as basic legal
prescriptions; the flexible social settings, such as television production in
newsrooms; and the individual psychobiographies, such as a journalist’s
professional background.
Over the past few years, the first author of this chapter has been
involved with large transdisciplinary research projects that have investigated
journalists’ text production processes in order to identify workplace
strategies and practices in the newsroom (for an overview, see Perrin,
2012). One of the first of these projects was the Swiss Federal Office of
Communication (OFCOM) project, a qualitative and explorative
investigation of journalistic writing in Swiss print, radio, TV, and on-line
news offices (Perrin, 2001). Data on writing processes were obtained from
journalists’ workstations in media newsrooms and evaluated as case
studies (for further details, see Perrin, 2003; Perrin & Ehrensberger-Dow,
2006). The project examined journalists’ practices in order to deduce their
strategies of news production. Specifically of interest were the strategies
used by journalists in the process of writing to ensure that their text
products were dramaturgically effective in terms of text function,
meaning, structure, and language variant.
In a follow-up project called IDÉE SUISSE (see Perrin, Burger, Fürer,
Gnach, Schanne, & Wyss, 2009; Perrin, 2011), the interplay of the
language policy, organizational norms, and journalistic practices of the
multilingual Swiss public service broadcasting company was investigated.
As a public service institution, the Swiss broadcaster has a federal,
societal, cultural, and linguistic mandate to fulfill, which the project
reconstructed from a socio-linguistic perspective as promoting social
integration by promoting public understanding. In a highly multilingual
country like Switzerland, this means, at first glance, promoting discourse
across the language boundaries. The focus of the project was to establish
whether and how the company should, actually does, and could fulfill its
language-focused societal remit.
The research questions and framework of the IDÉE SUISSE project were
developed in collaboration with actors in the real-life worlds of media
politics, media management, and journalism. The project comprised four
modules which a) traced the development of the language policy
expectations of the broadcasting company using document analysis and
thematic interviews; b) reconstructed management’s actions and reactions,
356 Chapter Twenty

interpretations, and reasons and those of their leading media outlets, again
using document analysis and thematic interviews; c) investigated the text
production practices of journalists working for the most important
German- and French-language information broadcasts with process and
product analysis; and d) used discourse analysis to investigate the quality
control follow-up communication in the editorial offices of the leading
news programs.
In corpora from projects such as OFCOM and IDÉE SUISSE, we have
identified various categories of strategies and practices oriented towards
the writing process and the text product. To do so, we combined induction
and deduction in all the projects, according to grounded theory (e.g.,
Glaser & Holton, 2004; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Kelle, 2005; Strauss &
Corbin, 1990). Data sampling, data analysis, and theory development
interact to the point where the evaluation of new data is not likely to
contribute to an increased understanding of the phenomenon under
investigation, namely how journalists deal with the challenges of
multilingual sources. The result is a set of probability statements about
what works for whom under which circumstances.
In the case of the IDÉE SUISSE project, the overall findings show that
the knowledge of how to bridge the public mandate and market forces
cannot be identified in executive suites, but in newsrooms. Whereas the
managers are usually frustrated by the expectations of media politics,
some experienced journalists find solutions to overcome the conflict
between the public mandate and the market. These solutions tend to
emerge when the journalists tackle complex and unexpected problems in
critical situations within their daily routines. In this chapter, we focus on
routines and practices of translating.
The question of interest here is what exactly journalists do if the
incoming texts or other source materials are in a different language from
the target language of the outgoing texts. In addition, we are interested in
exploring whether institutionalized translation policies guide journalistic
practices in such circumstances or whether individual practices guide
processes. In the case of the former, professional translators might be
foreseen for collaborative news text production whereas in the latter
journalists might develop and rely on their own translation strategies.

The Study
The data for the present study are drawn from a large meta-corpus of
journalists’ writing processes that we have been building over the past 15
years. At the time of writing, it includes data from five research projects,
 Translating the News 357

including OFCOM and IDÉE SUISSE. The OFCOM corpus consists of

recordings of 40 news production processes from 17 journalists working in
17 different print, radio, TV, and online newsrooms in Switzerland. Based
on this type of corpus (one journalist per newsroom), translation strategies
and practices can be related to journalists (and their psychobiographies,
settings, and contextual resources) as representatives of their profession.
The IDÉE SUISSE corpus, to give another example, contains similar
production data from fifteen journalists from three different Swiss news
programs. Their text production processes were followed for one week
each, which resulted in 140 case studies of situated text production. The
journalists in our projects have a wide range of professional experience,
ranging from experts (i.e., with extensive professional experience in news
journalism, working for a leading medium and/or with multi-media
experience) to relatively inexperienced (i.e., with only two or three years
of journalism experience).
Investigating text production in the natural setting of the newsroom
requires combining non-intrusive methods. Processes, products, and
contexts have to be addressed with different, specific methods. Those
methods must be non-intrusive in order to avoid disturbances and
reactivity in the field. In our research, we apply Progression Analysis, an
ethnographic computer-based multi-method approach for tracking text
production in natural contexts (Perrin, 2003, 2006; Perrin & Ehrensberger-
Dow, 2008). Progression Analysis and related approaches have been
applied to investigate the writing processes of journalists, translators,
Public Relations (PR) professionals, and schoolchildren (e.g., Gnach,
Wiesner, Bertschi-Kaufmann, & Perrin, 2007; Perrin, 2003, 2006; Perrin
& Ehrensberger-Dow, 2008; Sleurs & Jacobs, 2005; Van Hout &
Macgilchrist, 2007). It combines ethnographic observation, interviews,
computer logging, screenshot recordings, and cue-based retrospective
verbalizations to gather linguistic and contextual data. Thus, the
phenomenon under investigation can be viewed from several perspectives,
which can complement or contradict each other. Progression Analysis
allows data to be obtained on three levels in order to investigate text
reproduction as a situated activity in organizational and societal frameworks.
The first level of Progression Analysis considers the journalists and the
writing situation, including the journalists’ professional socialization and
economic, institutional, and technological influences on the work situation
as well as the specific writing task that the journalists must accomplish.
Data on the journalists’ self-perceptions are obtained in semi-standardized
interviews focusing on their writing and professional experience and their
358 Chapter Twenty

workplace. Ethnographic data are collected through participatory and

video observations of the various forms of collaboration at the workplace.
The second level of Progression Analysis records every keystroke and
writing movement in the emerging text with logging and screenshot
recording programs that run in the background behind the text editors that
the journalists usually use, for instance behind the user interfaces of the
news editing systems. The recording can follow the writing process over
several workstations and does not influence the performance of the editing
system or the journalist. The computer recordings provide information
about what journalists actually do during the writing process, with every
movement and revision step representing intermediate text versions in the
writing process. From the resulting digital data, various visualizations can
be produced automatically.
One type of visualization possible from data obtained in the second
level of Progression Analysis is S-notation, a transcription standard for
writing processes developed by Severinson-Eklundh and Kollberg (1996)
that indicates revisions in terms of insertions, deletions, and their sequence
in the writing process. Wherever the writing is interrupted to delete or add
something, S-notation inserts a numbered break-character |n in the text.
Deleted passages are in numbered n[square brackets]n and insertions in
numbered n{curly braces}n, with the subscripts and superscripts indicating
the order of these steps. For example, in “between 6[Americ|6]6,7{anti-
American and}7|8pro-American countries” the word fragment “Americ” is
deleted first, then “anti-American and” is inserted. S-notation simplifies
the micro-analysis of the writing event (see Example 1 below). The overall
writing pattern, by contrast, is traced in a progression graph, which
indicates how the writer moved the cursor through the developing text.
These cursor movements are interpreted as the writer’s shifts in focus. The
temporal sequence of revisions in the writing process is represented on the
ordinal scale of the horizontal axis, and the spatial sequence of revisions in
the text product is shown on the vertical axis, also ordinal (an example is
provided in Figure 20-2 below).
The third level of Progression Analysis permits inferences to be made
about the strategies journalists use and their awareness of them. As soon as
possible after the writing process, the journalists view the recordings of
how their texts came into being and continuously comment on what they
did while writing and why. An audio recording is made of these cue-based
retrospective verbal protocols (RVP). The RVP is transcribed and then
encoded as the author’s verbalization of aspects of his or her language
awareness: writing and translation strategies as well as conscious writing
and translating practices. The multiple levels of Progression Analysis
 Translating the News 359

allow the strategies and practices that the journalists articulate in these
cue-based retrospective verbalizations to be placed in relation to the
situational analysis and the data from the computer recordings. Although
translation practices were not of primary interest when the data were first
collected, the findings presented in the next section draw on the corpora
from the two research projects mentioned above. The data have been re-
analyzed to focus specifically on translation processes in newsrooms.

Findings: Translating as Tacit Knowledge

A selection of cases from our corpus is presented below to illustrate
how journalists deal with the problem of working between languages in
the newsroom. First, we provide an example of intra-lingual translation
designed to suit the linguistic needs of a dialect-speaking audience and use
it to demonstrate the degree of detail that our multi-method approach of
Progression Analysis provides (a). We then consider four cases of inter-
lingual translation of source material for voice-overs (b, c, d) and an
interview (e). Finally, we integrate the insights from all levels of
Progression Analysis to discuss why translation matters in the newsroom
(f).

(a) Intra-Lingual Translation to Meet Audience Needs

The first example from our corpus demonstrates how journalists adapt
the presentation of news to suit the linguistic needs of a dialect-speaking
audience. A journalist working for TELEZÜRI, a local TV station focused
on the city of Zurich and surroundings, produced an short item about a
presidential election victory in South Korea. The source material was
written in standard German, but the journalist had to write the item in the
local dialect (Zurich German) in order to meet his station’s guidelines of
audience design. In Zurich and the rest of the German-speaking part of
Switzerland, standard German is used for most types of written
communication in a situation that is often referred to as medial diglossia
(cf. Burger, 2004; Rash, 1998). However, local variants of Swiss German
are used for virtually all spoken interactions (except with foreigners or
Swiss from the other language areas) and the distinctive local dialects are
highly valued as identity markers by Swiss German communities.
Progression Analysis, which includes the revisions and the phases in
the writing process, the text versions, and the translation strategies and
practices as derived from the retrospective verbal protocol, makes it
possible for us to examine and reconstruct the story behind the story that
360 Chapter Twenty

this journalist wrote. He made several revisions while producing the text,
for example moving back to insert or delete certain words or rewrite
sections; the steps in his writing process are shown in S-notation in
Example 1. There are very few revisions in the first two lines but
numerous insertions (indicated by curly brackets) and deletions (indicated
by square brackets) afterwards.

Example 1. S-notation of the writing process for the TELEZÜRI news item

Wahlsieg vo de Opposition1[s|1]1 z Süd-Korea: Neuer 2[S|2]2Koreanische

Staats-Cehf isch de 74-jährig Kim Dae Jung. Sein Wahlsieg bezeichnet er
als erste friedliche Machtwechsel sit de Staatsgründig. De neui Präsident
3
[r|3]3het sini Landslüüt 13[dezu uufgr7[u]7|88{ü}8|9eft]13|1414{druf
vorbereitet}14|15, 4[zäme für en|4]4,15[sich]15|1616{dass}16|17 6[zäme
]6|75[für|5]5,18{si }18|19im Kampf gege d Wirtschafts-Krise
9
[iizsetze]9|1010{au 17[uf ]17|1811[Entbehrige]11|1212{Verzicht}12|13
19
[vorz'bereite|11]19|20}10,20{21[mönd]21 hi-neh|2122{ }22mönd|22}20.|6

The detail analysis of a writing event can be considerably simplified

with S-notation, and the broader pattern can be traced in a progression
graph (see Figure 20-2), which shows how the journalist moved through
the developing text for the TELEZÜRI news item. The temporal sequence
of revisions is shown on the horizontal axis, and the spatial sequence of
revisions in the final target text is on the vertical axis. Represented in this
way, the revisions describe a two-dimensional graph of text progression. If
a journalist completed an item by only moving forward and never deleting
anything or jumping to previous parts of the text to insert something, the
graph would be a straight line from the upper left corner to the lower right.
However, most real-life writing processes show more complex progression
graphs.
In the writing process of the TELEZÜRI item (Figure 20-2) we can
distinguish three phases. The process was relatively linear in the initial
phase as the journalist formulated the first draft of his item with only a few
revisions as he went along (revisions 1-5). A second phase started with a
jump back in the text (revisions 6-8) before continuing with another
relatively linear process (revisions 9-12). The beginning of a third phase is
marked by an abrupt jump back in the text almost to the beginning of the
last sentence (revision 13, marked with the second thick vertical line in
Figure 20-2) and then another relatively linear progression to the end of
the text as the last sentence is rewritten. The thick horizontal lines
demarcate the zone in which the revisions were devoted to the last
sentence of the item.
 Translating the News 361

Figure 20-2: Progression graph showing the three phases of the writing process
for the TELEZÜRI news item.

A closer examination of the text versions of the TELEZÜRI item at the

end of each phase reveals that the last sentence underwent considerable
shifts in meaning as the journalist revised it. The role that the president
ascribed to his compatriots in the first version, as active agents having a
choice to commit themselves, progressively shifted by the final version to
that of passive victims being forced to accept cutbacks (see the English
translations of the three Zurich German versions in Example 2).

Example 2. English translations of the Zurich German versions of the last

sentence of the TELEZÜRI news item at the end of each phase (changes
between versions are indicated in bold).
Phase Version
1 The new president called on his compatriots to
commit themselves to the fight against the
economic crisis.
2 The new president called on his compatriots to
prepare for deprivations in the fight against the
economic crisis.
3 The new president prepared his compatriots for
having to accept cutbacks in the fight against the
economic crisis.
362 Chapter Twenty

After the writing process, the journalist commented on his actions as

he watched the computer recordings. What he said as he watched himself
revising the third sentence of the item suggests that he was less concerned
about the roles of the text agents in the item than about the linguistic
sensitivities of his audience ("hmm, das klingt immer noch nicht nach
züritütsch" [Hmm, this still doesn’t sound like Zurich German]). This is
consistent with the policy of TELEZÜRI, which considers speaking the
news in the regional dialect of Zurich as an important part of the station’s
audience design. Since part of the local station’s mandate is to be close to
its audience, the journalist’s strategy consists of translating written
standard German to the dialect spoken in the region in order to stage
proximity to the audience. The final version of the news item is given in
Example 3.

Example 3. Final version of the TELEZÜRI news item in Zurich German

[English translation]

Wahlsieg vo de Opposition z Süd-Korea: Neuer Koreanische Staats-

Cehf [sic] isch de 74-jährig Kim Dae Jung. Sein Wahlsieg
bezeichnet er als erste friedliche Machtwechsel sit de Staatsgründig.
De neui Präsident het sini Landslüüt druf vorbereitet, dass si im
Kampf gege d Wirtschafts-Krise au Verzicht hi-neh mönd.

[Election win for the opposition in South Korea: The new Korean
head of state is the 74-year-old Kim Dae Jung. He calls his election
victory the first peaceful transfer of power since the establishment of
the country. The new president prepared his compatriots for having
to accept cutbacks in the fight against the economic crisis.]

The TELEZÜRI case shows how the quantitative and qualitative data are
combined to explain what writers under investigation do and why they do
it. On the one hand, the recordings of the writing activities are used as
cues for the retrospective verbal protocols and, on the other, the verbalized
strategies and practices can be related to situated activity. It is only by
triangulating data across the three levels of Progression Analysis that we
are able to identify intentions and understandings beyond the situated
activity: in this case, the language awareness guiding the journalist’s
translation.
The following extracts from case studies focus on a single level of
progression analysis to highlight the role of translation in newswriting.
 Translating the News 363

(b) Adapting the Source Text by Altering Quotes

in Voice-Over Translations

In an item for the Swiss national German-language news broadcast

about the election of a non-permanent member to the United Nations
Security Council, a journalist decided to alter quotes slightly in the voice-
over translation. The item reported on a duel between two countries for a
seat on the Security Council and used two quotes: one from the US
ambassador for the UN and the other from the president of one of the
countries competing for the seat. The journalist’s comments about his
decision to alter the quotes suggest that he has a rather uninformed view of
what translation is (see Example 4; English translations of the original
language in each case are provided in italics below each line of the
transcript).

Example 4. Extract from the retrospective verbal protocol about the UN

Security Council item (sf_ts_061018_1300_sicherheitsratsabstimmung).

0786 und es macht keinen sinn einfach zu übersetzen so wie es ist

and it makes no sense just to translate it as it is
0787 das kann allenfalls ein übersetzer machen
this could be done by a translator
0788 der einfach nur übersetzt
who simply translates
0789 ich muss verstehen was er meint
I have to understand what he [the text agent] means
0790 sonst versteht es der zuschauer natürlich auch nicht
otherwise the audience won’t understand either

This journalist seems to believe that a translator “simply translates”

without understanding what is meant, a view that professional translators
would not share. In their understanding, professional translation never
takes place in a vacuum. Translators are commissioned by clients to
translate texts for particular purposes and readerships within the target
culture and should be told, or be able to infer, as much as possible about
the recipients, time, place, occasion, medium, and intended function of the
translated text (cf. Holz-Mänttäri, 1984; Nord, 1997; Reiss & Vermeer,
1991; Vermeer, 1989/2004). Throughout the process, translators occupy a
central position as experts in a complex system, bringing various types of
competence to bear in order to complete the specific translation task at
hand. Although the journalist may not have realized it, his altering of the
364 Chapter Twenty

quotes can be considered a very specific translation strategy of adapting

sources to achieve dramaturgical objectives (for more on adaptation as a
translation strategy, see Baker & Saldanha, 2009).

(c) Translating Collaboratively

Another process in our corpus, from a French-language newsroom,
provides an insightful example of collaborative translation work. A
journalist prepared his text for an item about a plane crash in Indonesia
while sitting next to the cutter, who was working on the pictures for the
same item. The journalist worked from an English source text, which he
was translating into French. At one point, the cutter offered an alternative
to the journalist’s incorrect translation of a verb (pull instead of push),
which initiated an exchange of several moves in which they seemed to test
the sound of the two English verbs, perhaps by retrieving mental
representations of them, before agreeing on the right translation (see
Example 5).

Example 5. Extract of the writing process of the Indonesian plane crash

item (J=journalist; C=cutter; tsr_tj_070307_1245 _yogyakarta).

0694 J: i pull four victims out of the plane

[repeats English news text]
0695 J: j’ai poussé quatre victimes hors de l’avion
I have pushed three victims out of the plane
0698 C: j’ai tiré
I have pulled
0699 J: j’ai tiré pull push ah
I have pulled pull push ah
0703 C: push
0704 J: push ah c’est push pull
push ah it’s push pull
0705 J: non c’est pull
no, it’s pull
0706 C: ah tu tires
ah you pull

(d) Translating to Fit the Original Language

In another case in our corpus, the journalist referred explicitly to his
translation strategy, which was to take certain liberties in order to allow
his audience to hear the original language (see Example 6). The item is
 Translating the News 365

about the resignation of the U.S. Secretary of Defense and shows scenes of
the speech he gave at the official announcement. Rather than translating
everything that was said in the video excerpt, the journalist’s decision to
focus on translating only the key sentences of the speech meant that the
Secretary of Defense’s voice was clearly audible in parts and especially at
the end, when he gave his final farewell. This strategy seems to be based
on an implicit journalistic norm: keep the translation as short as possible
so that the original voice remains audible before and after the voiceover
translation.

Example 6. Extract from the retrospective verbal protocol about the

Secretary of Defense item (sf_ts_061108_2400_rumsfeld).

0955 dass man lieber auf kosten der übersetzungsgenauigkeit

that at the expense of a close translation
0956 etwas freiheit sich erlauben soll
it’s better to take some liberties
0957 und dafür die leute sollen diesen historischen moment
and instead people should be able to experience this
historic moment
0958 im o-ton eben mitbekommen
from the original recording

(e) Finding the Right People to Translate

Evidence that we found in our corpus for another translation strategy
was one journalist’s recognition of when the available resources were not
up to the task (see Example 7). Rather than trying to deal with the
difficulties inherent in transferring information from one language to
another, this journalist raised the possibility in the newsroom conference
of collaborating with a translator in the text production situation. As
current models (for reviews see Göpferich, 2008; Hurtado Albir & Alves,
2009) clearly illustrate, translation competence involves much more than
just the ability to use more than one language, and it is important for
journalists to be able to find the right people to take on tasks they realize
are beyond them (for a discussion of the translator’s role in global news
production see Bielsa & Bassnett, 2009).
366 Chapter Twenty

Example 7. Extract from a newsroom conference

(sf_zvz_070123_1400_editorial_discourse)

0313 heute ist für mich ein tag an dem ich ganz stark
today is a day for me where I would quite definitely
0314 eigentlich einen übersetzer bräuchte
actually need a translator
0315 weisst du der mir diese fragen übersetzt
you know who could translate these questions for me

(f) General Findings

These cases illustrate that translation matters throughout the writing
helix (Figure 20-3) of news production. It begins when journalists
understand and accept a task (TASK COMPREHENDING); increasingly, these
tasks involve more than one language. The writing process ends when they
send the results of their work to their colleagues who assemble news
programs from individual items (IMPLEMENTING THE PRODUCT). In
between, they read sources in various languages (READING SOURCE TEXT)
as well as their text produced so far (READING OWN TEXT). In the inner
circle of the writing process, four phases recur and overlap, each
dominated by activities which contribute, on their specific levels, to the
production of the text. GOAL SETTING typically focuses on the text as a
whole. In this phase, multilingual environments require decisions about,
for example, whether sources from other linguistic communities are given
a voice or not. In PLANNING phases, decisions are made about dubbing or
subtitling audio or visual quotations. In CONTROLLING phases of writing,
journalists might switch linguistic codes for rhetorical purposes.
MONITORING demands (multi-)linguistic competence or access to (multi-)
linguistic resources in order to check the accuracy of the text product (see
Example 3).
However, it is not only words, sentences, and paragraphs that
journalists deal with when producing their texts. They also HANDLE their
SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT, such as interactions with superiors, co-writers,
cutters (Example 5), sources, translators (Example 7), and interpreters in
the field. The TOOLS environment in the newsrooms includes access to
multilingual resources, such as machine translation. In their TASK
ENVIRONMENT, journalists have to set priorities, such as whether a long
quotation is worth having translated.
Whereas the eleven activity fields outlined above refer primarily to
managing processes, the five other fields of activities are directly
oriented to the emerging text products.
 Translating the News 367

Figure 20-3: The writing helix (Perrin, 2012, p. 208).

When journalists find and use sources in other languages (FINDING

THE SOURCES), when they define and delimit their topics (LIMITING THE
TOPIC), when they decide on angle and stance (TAKING OWN POSITION),
when they shape their stories (STAGING THE STORY; Example 6), and
when they focus on aspects they consider interesting and relevant to the
audience (ESTABLISHING RELEVANCE FOR THE AUDIENCE; Example 4),
they have to decide what parts of the source material they will translate
and how.
Our findings show that rather than being a separate process,
translation is ubiquitous and interacts with newswriting at all levels and
stages. It matters in news production because journalists’ practices and
strategies can shape who is represented in news items, what is talked
about, and how text agents, topics, and utterances are framed.
Translation in the newsroom is not an add-on to newswriting as it may
have been before the glocalization of newsflows; it is a constitutive part
of it, intertwined with all key activities of news generation, selection,
and presentation.
368 Chapter Twenty

Conclusion
Translation practices can range from a sort of inner translation, such as
when journalists reformulate the language of the source text to another
language variety in order to meet audience design standards, to the
purposeful omission of utterances from sources that journalists do not
understand or do not have the resources to translate. Since they decide
which voices will be heard, journalists have an important gatekeeping
function, which can be affected by inappropriate translation strategies.
We have found evidence suggesting that journalists’ translation
strategies and practices are based on the availability of external linguistic
resources, on journalists’ linguistic awareness, and in some cases, on
experienced journalists’ elaborated tacit knowledge (cf. Agar, 2010;
Polanyi, 1966; Sarangi, 2007). From the perspective of professional
translation, this awareness and knowledge represent potential for
organizational development. Even though some journalists may be
sensitive to the challenges of working between languages, they may never
have reflected on how they do it or whether this is the best way to do so,
let alone the organizational significance and societal impact of the tacit
knowledge they have and base their practices on. A transdisciplinary goal
is to release this tacit knowledge–the situated, implicit and individual
strategies and practices of certain experienced players or so-called positive
deviants (see Agar (2010) who draws on Polanyi (1966) and Schein
(1987)).
More specifically, the question is how such tacit knowledge as well as
insights from translation theory and professional practice can be made
available to media organizations and the professionals involved in order to
improve workflow efficiency and output quality of journalism in a
globally networked multilingual world. In a top-down approach, we are
systematically transforming and disseminating the knowledge generated in
our research projects through organizational consulting. In such projects
we strive to stimulate a shift of focus towards allocating appropriate
resources for translating in the newsrooms. In a bottom-up approach, we
are transforming professional translation knowledge through training,
coaching, and educating future professionals in journalism schools and
practitioners in the newsrooms.
Given the relevance of media in public discourse and democracy
(Schudson, 2008), investigating and improving multilingual practices in
the newsroom has the potential to contribute not only to fostering
professional and organizational success as well as a fairer society. It can
 Translating the News 369

also consolidate the importance of our discipline (cf. Antos, 2003; Perrin
2012).

Acknowledgement
The IDÉE SUISSE project was funded by the Swiss National Science
Foundation, National Research Programme 56, 2005-2009.

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