Transediting, journalation, news translation… Journalistic translation has many names, and translations have many functions in media. This course allows you to familiarize yourself with a number of different translatorial processes embedded in journalistic practices, and with a number of methods used in their research. In your final essay, you can select your focus according to your own interests to deepen your knowledge in a particular area of this cluster of practices.

To complete this course, you need to

1. attend the minimum of 4 out of 5 of the lectures listed below;
2. read the minimum of 3 of the items on the reading list below & identify and read the minimum of 2 more references relevant to your topic in #3; and
3. write an essay (approx. 3000 words)  on the topic of your choice, appropriately citing the above references (esseen saa kirjoittaa myös suomeksi).

Queries & submission of essays by translation students: Professor Kaisa Koskinen kaisa.a.koskinen@uta.fi

Submission of essays by journalism students: Professor Risto Kunelius risto.kunelius@uta.fi

LECTURES

Monday 4.6.2018, 15:30–17, B3116

An Introduction to Journalistic Translation Research

Roberto A. Valdeón (University of Oviedo, Spain)

This talk will review the most relevant publications in the subfield of Journalistic Translation Research (JTR), starting with the introduction of "transiting" in 1989. This term was coined by Karen Stetting to refer to the processes involved in news translation and has become a useful (and contested) word in JTR. While some have often used it in their research (van Doorslaer, Hernández Guerrero, Valdeón), others posit that it is unnecessary to have a specific term to refer to news translation (Schäffner, Bassnett). the talk will consider the two main approaches to news translation, namely studies of the processes and studies of the products, and discuss the connections between JTR and Communication Studies, from which JTR has borrowed a number of concepts and methods, such as that of framing.

Tuesday 5.6.2018, 13:45–15:15, B3116

The concept of translation in Translation and Journalism Studies

Roberto A. Valdeón

This talk will explore the concept of "translation" in these two disciplines. Starting from the consolidation of journalistic translation as a subarea of research within translation studies and the calls for interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis of news texts, it will interrogate the lack of interaction between Translation and Journalism Studies by examining how “translation” is examined in the latter. After providing the definition in general dictionaries and in some Translation Studies reference works, with particular reference to Delisle et al, the talk will present the findings of a study of a corpus of 186 articles written by Journalism Studies scholars. The results of the study show that these researchers use “translation” to refer to linguistic transfer as well as to other more general transformations. It also demonstrates that “transediting”, widely used in journalistic translation research, is rarely used in the publications by Journalism Studies scholars.

Wednesday 6.6.2018, 13:45–15:15, B4087

Methods and topics in Journalistic Translation Research

Roberto A. Valdeón

In this talk, I will present some of the methodological approaches used in the study of Journalistic Translation, notably corpus-based and case studies, but will also provide some information on ethnographic approaches, which have been used (albeit not frequently) to analyse the process of translation in the news room. I will also present some of the topics that researchers from North America, Europe and China have been delved into, e.g. political texts, editorials and opinion columns and hard news.

Friday 8.6.2018, 11.15-12.45, B3116

The Role of Literary Translations in Immigrant Periodicals in the USA: Cultural Image Making and Identity Building through Translation

Nike K. Pokorn (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)

The aim of the presentation is to highlight the transfer of information about national and cultural images through literary translation in the periodicals published by an émigré community in the US in the interwar period. Since every translation involves the dissemination of certain cultural images (Doorslaer 2012), I will argue that by means of the English translation of specific literary works published in the immigrant periodicals, immigrant diasporas in the US attempted to construct their own representation of their original culture, and communicate this image to mainstream US culture. I will focus on the role of literary translations published in 3 periodicals within the Slovene immigrant community in the USA in the interwar period, paying particular attention to the selections of source texts and the packaging of target texts (Kafh 2000). It will be argued first, that these translations published in the newspapers were key to the building of the imagined community of Slovene-Americans in the spirit of nineteenth-century nation building enterprises (Anderson 2006, Pogacar 2017); and second, that by means of the English translation of specific literary works, the immigrant diaspora of Slovene-Americans in the US attempted to construct their own representation of their original culture, and communicate this image to mainstream US culture. By contributing to the construction of national and cultural images of Slovene-Americans, translations thus became an active part of intra-cultural communications between a marginalized and dispersed immigrant linguistic community (Gentzler 2007) and the majority English-speaking society, both of which, together with other immigrant communities, helped constitute the US culture.

Friday 8.6.2018, 13.45-15.15, B3116

Translation and the Periodical Press (distance lecture)

Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar (Boğaziçi University and York University, Glendon College)

My talk will explore the potential offered by the periodical press for historical translation research. I will discuss the ways in which the field of periodical studies and the methodologies it has been building may help enrich the framework for historical studies on translation. In turn, I will argue that translation studies can also fill a major gap in periodical studies by lending the field some of its concepts and tools, as translation, as a specific text type and a production strategy, is largely ignored by periodical scholars. My lecture will include case studies from a range of different periodical genres.

READING LIST

(minimum requirement 3 of these + 2 others)

Conway, Kyle (2010) Paradoxes of translation in television news. Media, Culture & Society 32(6): 979-996.

Conway, Kyle (2015) What is the role of culture in news translation? A materialist approach. Perspectives 23(4):

Davier, Lucile (2015) ‘Cultural translation’ in news agencies? A plea to broaden the definition of translation. Perspectives 23(4).

Doorslaer, Luc van (2010) The Double Extension of Translation in the Journalistic Field. Across Languages and Cultures 11 (2), 175–188.

Kang Ji-Hae (2007) Recontextualization of News Discourse, The Translator 13(2): 219-242

Schäffner, Chistina (2012) Rethinking transediting. META 57(4): 866–883.