News gathering and dissemination

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News gathering and dissemination
reports, however, are usually restricted to the 
event being reported, intended as they are for 
incorporation into the reports put out by a 
wide variety of client organizations. Reports 
produced by commercial, transnational agencies 
carefully use terminology which is as ‘neutral’ 
as possible, as client organizations may have 
very different cultural or political affiliations. 
The editorial policies of government-owned 
agencies, or activist organizations, as well as 
the language used in their reports, commonly 
reflect the policy of the controlling organization. 
These factors impact upon translation strategies; 
they also influence textual choices in material 
accompanying video footage put out by agencies 
(usually called ‘dope sheets’), which is commonly 
provided in a vehicular transnational language.
At the editing stage, journalists commonly 
assemble documents from disparate sources – 
typically, agency reports and reports from one 
or more of their own reporters. Where such 
amalgamation also involves translation – for 
example, from a foreign national agency or 
media – it is normal for this to be undertaken 
by a journalist working on the story who has 
relevant bilingual competence, since translation 
is viewed as only one component of the process of 
transfer from one news organization to another 
(Orengo 2005: 169–70; Schäffner 2005: 158; Tsai 
2005). Among other implications, this means 
that an act of news translation undertaken at 
the editing stage is frequently – if not usually – 
based upon more than one ‘original’ text, with 
these texts commonly summarized and amalga-
mated in the same process as translation.
At the dissemination end, translation may 
be undertaken either at the output or reception 
stages. Many news agencies produce output 
material both in the national language of the 
nation to which the agency belongs and also 
in a transnational language, most commonly 
English. Middle Eastern news agencies benefit 
from the fact that the commonest national 
regional language, Arabic, is also a transna-
tional language – as, of course, do English 
language agencies, and to a more limited extent 
Spanish news agencies. Major agencies which 
translate their own material (or some selection 
of it) include the European Broadcasting Union 
(which circulates in English and French), 
Xinhua (China) and Agence France Presse, 
both of which circulate material in English as 
well as the original agency language. There are 
also agencies which specialize in bringing news 
from particular areas of the world and making 
it available in a target language; Outherenews, 
for example, specializes in making news from 
the Arabic-speaking world available in English 
(Outherenews 2006). Alternatively, bilingual 
journalists in ‘retail media’ may take incoming 
texts and adapt them, by both editing and trans-
lation, for the audience in question.
Translation may also be undertaken by media 
monitoring organizations, which access a wide 
range of media in a variety of languages and 
disseminate versions of the reports they retrieve 
to clients and other interested parties. Probably 
the largest of these are the two main English 
language media monitoring organizations: the 
BBC and the American Open Source Center 
(OSC). The BBC maintains a monitoring section 
which monitors media from outside the UK and 
is administratively and financially separate from 
the rest of the organization; it serves a wide 
variety of clients, including UK government 
departments. The OSC similarly monitors 
media external to the USA. Many organizations 
undertake translinguistic media monitoring, the 
results of which are circulated as a working 
tool: for example the US military in Iraq has a 
monitoring service for Arabic language media 
(and rumours) called the ‘Baghdad Mosquito’ 
(Shanker 2004).
Because of the association between news 
translation and national boundaries, trans-
lation tends to occur in the category of foreign 
news, which is commonly subject to editorial 
processes different to those of domestic news. 
It has often been pointed out that large sections 
of the planet are condemned to silence in the 
media of the industrial West, a situation that 
is exacerbated by the fact that the media of 
‘Third World’ nations depend upon the big 
Western-owned transnational news agencies for 
news about these nations’ own neighbours. In 
addition, foreign news is widely regarded in 
the USA as uninteresting to most of the media 
audience (Arnett 1998). In general, news from 
abroad is more frequently subject to summary, 
abbreviation and editorial selection than 
domestic news, a process sometimes brutally 
summarized as ‘McLurg’s Law’, according to 
which publication of news depends upon this 
equation: the scope, importance or drama 
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