In my last post, I’d begun to think about the potential ethical and political role that translation could play with respect to how warfare and armed conflict is framed in the news. Drawing from Judith Butler’s work, I’d examined how the work of Roberto A. Valdeón gives us a better understanding of how the frames of war maintain their reiteration through news translation.
The gatekeeping metaphor was originally introduced by the German-American social psychologist Kurt Lewin in 1947. The key concepts in Lewin’s theory which primarily focuses on changing the food habits of a population are channel, gate, gatekeeper and force. For Lewin (1947, 144-145), the food moves through some channels in order to reach the family table, and there are certain areas (i.e. gates) within channels where decisions on what to select and what to discard are continuously made by individual gatekeepers.
The title of this post comes from Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2010, hereafter FoW) Bizarrely, the book was translated in French as Ce qui fait une vie: Essai sur la violence, la guerre et le deuil. We’ve lost the reference to framing in this translation, which is unfortunate, as it is framing itself on Butler’s account that determines what makes a life, and what makes a life grievable, or what makes the loss of a life appear as a justifiable outcome of contemporary warfare. Following the important work of Roberto A.
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