News gathering and dissemination

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News gathering and 
dissemination
Translation in news gathering and dissemi-
nation (or ‘news translation’ for short) can be 
considered with respect to two different sets of 
concerns. The first of these is the question of 
the relationship between two texts; the second 
is the nature of the process within which the 
translation is undertaken. The first is not – 
if taken in isolation from the second – very 
different from translation considered in other 
contexts: the relationship is influenced by a 
range of factors, which include the translator’s 
understanding of the context and purpose of the 
original. The second takes as its focus the nature 
of organizations involved in news gathering and 
dissemination and is concerned primarily with 
who undertakes translation, in what context, for 
what purposes. The first is concerned primarily 
with news output, or news considered as a 
series of statements about the world; the second 
is concerned with the process within which 
that output is produced. The two may also be 
considered in combination, typically in order to 
investigate the extent to which the process has 
an impact upon the relationship between the 
two (or more) texts.
News translation occurs primarily (but not 
exclusively) at the point where news crosses 
national boundaries; this is because of the 
traditional association linking news media 
with the nation state and national language 
(Anderson 1982) and has implications for the 
nature of news translation, as discussed later in 
this entry. However, this traditional association 
is no longer universal because of the rise of 
minority (or lesser-known) language media in 
previously monoglot states, and transnational 
media operating in widely used transnational 
languages. Moreover, many nation states are 
inhabited by linguistically diverse populations, 
with associated media, and indeed may not have 
a single national language (for example, India, 
Switzerland and many African nations).
While there are many studies of the language 
of news (for example, van Dijk 1991; Bell 1991; 
Fowler 1991; Fairclough 1995), such studies 
largely ignore the role of translation; their 
predominant focus is the discursive structure 
of news and a frequent concern is the extent 
to which particular articulations of words and 
expressions – especially recurrent ones – may 
impact upon public opinion (see Ackerman 
2006 for a particularly detailed example). This 
focus is also to be found in some studies of 
news translation (see various examples in Baker 
2006a). Other recent studies in translation focus 
on the information needs of a global economy, 
which include information transfers in the form 
of news (Bielsa 2005; Cronin 2005). Central to 
such concerns is a debate about the relationship 
between ‘globalization’ and ‘localization’ (see 
globalization), in which the functional needs 
of transnational linguistic transfer are poised in 
an unstable equilibrium between the demands 
of transfer (for example, speed and compre-
hensibility across cultural boundaries) and the 
demands of local reception, where comprehensi-
bility may be subject to the dynamics of spatially 
limited cultural forces. Here, the relationship 
between source and target texts is understood as 
a product of the process in which the linguistic 
transfer is undertaken.
If news translation is studied as a 
phenomenon in its own right, it is because it 
can be considered an articulation of discourse 
which produces its own range of effects: here, 
the act of translation is assumed to potentially 
produce transfers of meaning independently of 
other activities which produce such transfers. 
Thus, such analyses commonly take as their 
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