News gathering and dissemination

Norms 
189
of events must increase in proportion to the 
distance separating the event from the reporting 
medium (Palmer 2000: 28; Schlesinger 1987: 
117). This has a particular impact upon news 
translation: it means that translation in this 
context primarily takes the form of summary 
rather than in extenso translation. Indeed, 
translation strategies in news gathering and 
dissemination must generally be acknowledged 
as a mixture of selection, summary, contextual-
izing commentary and in extenso translation 
(see strategies).
As a result of the processes described 
above, translated material may exist in several, 
sometimes divergent, versions. For example, 
when President Ahmedinejad of Iran was quoted 
in English language media as saying that ‘Israel 
should be wiped off the map’, this quotation 
was taken from versions of a speech published 
in Farsi by the official Iranian Government 
news agency on 26 October 2005. During the 
following hours, three translations of this speech 
were widely circulated among international and 
transnational media; one was done by the Farsi 
section of the BBC Monitoring department, 
one by correspondents of the New York Times 
working in Teheran, and one by the pro-Israeli, 
US-based monitoring organization MEMRI 
(Middle East Media Research Institute). The 
translations differed in significant ways (Steele 
2006) and have since been heavily contested 
(Norouzi 2007). There was also an English 
language translation put out by the Iranian news 
agency itself, in two divergent versions (IRNA 
2005a, 2005b), and subsequent summaries and 
partial translations appeared in reports by other 
English language news agencies. 
Although this last example is only a single 
case, it illustrates the principles outlined here. 
First, it indicates the centrality of the insti-
tutionally embedded process involved, where 
translation is undertaken by both journalists 
and employees of media monitoring organi-
zations. Secondly, as a result of the insertion 
of translation into other editorial processes,