Observatoire du discours financier en traduction - traduction

Métaphoriser la crise: épidémie, accident, catastrophe, cataclysme

René Lemieux — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 17:23:19 +0000

Récemment publié dans la revue de traductologie Meta, l’article « Quand les médias traduisent la crise : les métaphores utilisées par la presse généraliste pendant la crise des subprimes »1 de Pier-Pascale Boulanger permet de comprendre l’usage des métaphores par les journalistes lors de la crise des subprimes de 2007-20082. Alors que plusieurs analyses de cet épisode de crise se sont intéressées à la présence ou non dans les journaux spécialisés de signaux indiquant son imminence, Boulanger s’intéresse ici plutôt aux représentations langagières de cette même crise dans le discours journalistique grand public. Son hypothèse de départ est à l’effet que « l’étude des métaphores permet[] de découvrir les concepts à partir desquels certaines questions politiques et économiques sont cadrées et motivées » (146). Les métaphores utilisées par les journalistes servent essentiellement à faciliter la compréhension pour le public d’éléments techniques laborieux à expliquer : « La vulgarisation motive l’invention de métaphores, notamment par l’usage de comparaisons elliptiques, qui ont la vertu de donner en peu de mots une idée générale d’un concept abstrait. » (150). À partir de l’analyse des métaphores utilisées par les journalistes financiers dans quatre grands journaux (Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, La Presse et Le Devoir), dans l’année 2007 (un corpus de 108 500 mots anglais et de 186 500 mots français), l’auteure s’est intéressée à quatre grands réseaux signifiants : l’épidémie, l’accident, la catastrophe et le cataclysme.

Les résultats de l’auteure (155, tableau 2) permettent de constater que la proportion de métaphores liées à l’épidémie est quasiment équivalente entre les journaux francophones et anglophones. Le nombre de métaphores relatives à la catastrophe est également assez semblable (les journalistes anglophones les utilisent une fois et demie plus). Pour l’accident et le cataclysme, par contre, une grande différence se fait voir : les journalistes anglophones utilisent quatre fois plus le concept métaphorique de l’accident alors que les journalistes francophones, de leur côté, utilisent trois fois plus le concept métaphorique du cataclysme. Boulanger en conclut que l’usage de ces métaphores participe à un « grand paradigme : l’impondérable » (156) :

Les catastrophes, les cataclysmes et les accidents ont ceci en commun qu’ils sont imprévisibles. Par transfert métaphorique, la crise est imprévisible. Loin d’être banal, le rapprochement implique un enjeu politique de taille. La croyance en l’imprévisibilité des crises financières conforte la perspective néolibérale de l’économie, qui défend le statu quo des marchés libres et peu réglementés. Étant donné qu’il y a des honoraires considérables à gagner sur le marché des créances titrisées, dont le commerce se fait de gré à gré et n’est pas assujetti aux obligations d’information comme l’est le marché boursier, rien ne motive ceux qui s’y enrichissent à le voir réglementé par l’État. Le consensus autour de l’idée selon laquelle personne n’a vu venir ni n’aurait pu prévenir la crise convient donc stratégiquement aux parties prenantes, qui gagnent à discréditer tout effort réglementaire afin de préserver leurs intérêts (ibid.).

De ce constat, l’auteure infère deux conséquences : l’image de l’impondérable masque les véritables agents de la crise et, de manière corollaire, invisibilise les vraies victimes de la crise (« les personnes physiques dépossédées de leur bien immobilier, de leur fonds de retraite et de leur emploi », ibid.). Pour l’auteure, l’usage des métaphores par les journalistes sert ainsi certains intérêts du milieu financier, aux dépens de ceux de leur lectorat.

On peut conclure, comme Boulanger le fait elle-même, que l’objectif de cet article est non seulement de présenter l’usage des métaphores en temps de crise, mais également de briser cette « censure structurale » résultant de l’usage d’un technolecte particulier (Bourdieu 2001). La formation des futurs traducteurs dans le domaine de l’économie et de la finance devrait ainsi prendre en compte ces formules métaphoriques faciles afin qu’ils adoptent des attitudes plus critiques devant le discours journalistique. Cependant, il faudrait aussi se demander s’il y a d’autres options à l’usage des métaphores : s’agit-il d’en trouver de plus fidèles, de les éviter entièrement, de développer un langage plus « neutre »? Une langue financière sans métaphore est-elle possible? L’auteure apporte néanmoins une contribution importante à l’étude des métaphores dans le discours journalistique contemporain. À cet égard, Boulanger en appelle à une étude sur le terme « victime » qui, partout présent, désigne rarement celles et ceux qui ont le plus souffert lors de cette crise.

1. Pier-Pascale Boulanger, « Quand les médias traduisent la crise : les métaphores utilisées par la presse généraliste pendant la crise des subprimes », Meta, vol. 61, numéro hors série : « Sciences en traduction », 2016.
2. Le terme subprime ou subprime loan est, rappelle l’auteure, « [t]raduit le plus souvent par prêt hypothécaire à risque ou prêt hypothécaire à haut risque » (152). L’auteure explique : « L’adjectif subprime qualifie le taux dont ce type de prêt hypothécaire est assorti et qui a la caractéristique d’être majoré par la banque afin de couvrir le risque de défaut de paiement. » (ibid.)

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

Quand les médias traduisent la crise: les métaphores utilisées par la presse généraliste pendant la crise des subprimes

Boulanger, Pier-Pascale. « Quand Les Médias Traduisent La Crise: Les Métaphores Utilisées Par La Presse Généraliste Pendant La Crise Des Subprimes ». Meta: Journal Des Traducteurs/meta:translators’ Journal 61, no hors série (2016), 144-162.

Article(s)

Métaphoriser la crise: épidémie, accident, catastrophe, cataclysme

Langage et pouvoir symbolique

Bourdieu, Pierre. Langage Et Pouvoir Symbolique. Paris: Seuil, 2001.

Article(s)

Métaphoriser la crise: épidémie, accident, catastrophe, cataclysme

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

René Lemieux — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 16:12:09 +0000

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. Most translators of news articles do not in fact see themselves as translators, as Valdeón convincingly shows through rigorous data and interviews, and this contributes to the further marginalization and invisibility of translation in, as he perhaps unwittingly borrows from Levinas and Blanchot, the domain of the anonymous and impersonal.

If news translation operates in reiterating the frames of war so that human (and other) lives are increasingly seem as ungrievable, as is Butler’s argument, the same can be said for the lives of languages and cultures. This is because framing not only serves to maintain the justifiability of warfare, but the entirety of the Western (particularly American) military-industrial complex, and thus the justifiability of neoliberal economic policies. Valdeón’s thesis is that the framing that occurs in news translation participates in the construction of a world “according to Anglophone norms, interests and, most likely, ideological agendas.” (Valdeón 2008, p. 323)

In my doctoral dissertation, I’d tried to tackle what ecolinguists and other theorists call the question of biocultural diversity; “the diversity of life in all its manifestations – biological, cultural, and linguistic – which are interrelated within a complex socio-ecological adaptive system.” (Maffi, 2005) The most widely cited study from 1992 (Krauss) estimates the loss of 90% of the world’s languages by the year 2100, with more recent studies placing the figure a bit more optimistically at 50%. But as most of these languages are spoken by a very small number of people, their loss entails the loss of an entire culture. As a report jointly released by UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), the WWF (The World Wide Fund for Nature) and Terralingua, an organization committed to biocultural diversity puts it, “languages have been called ‘the DNA of cultures’ – they have encoded the cultural knowledge that people have inherited from their ancestors, and each generation continues to add to this heritage.” (Skutnabb-Kangas, Maffi & Harmon, 2003) With respect to translation, Michael Cronin has importantly written that “the issue of translation and minority languages is not a peripheral concern for beleaguered fans of exotic peoples gabbling in incomprehensible tongues, but the single most important issue in translation studies today.” (Cronin 2003, 144) Cronin is one of the few people working in translation studies to champion “the contribution of translation to genuine biocultural diversity on the planet.” (Ibid., 4) So where does news translation fit in here?

Along with a study of the news events selected to be translated from BBCWorld into Spanish on the network BBCMundo, Valdeón suggests that

the selection of the information included in those reports contributes to create a certain perspective of the world, which is projected onto the target audience. This image accentuates an ethnocentric view of the world whereby Anglophone news is given prominence at the expense of more international items. (Valdeón 2008, 303)

Two examples can serve to illustrate Valdeón’s point; the news event of a terror alert at Ibiza’s airport, and another concerning the planting of bombs by the Basque separatist group ETA; both appear in BBCWorld, and yet were not deemed of sufficient interest for Spanish-language readers. In their selection of what news events to translate, he writes, “text producers are already participating in projecting a certain view of the world whereby Anglophone issues, however irrelevant or laughable… are regarded as crucial and, consequently, placed at the heart of the news portal.” (Valdeón 2008, 320) In other words, the frame that is being set up here could clearly be seen to contribute to a feeling of a certain inferiority of one’s culture and interests over another.

A key reason behind this may be a certain shift in the understanding of the role of the news in what Valdeón calls the information society. Valdeón’s thesis echoes Guy Debord’s famous theses in The Society of the Spectacle. As the latter argues, “the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people mediated by images.” (Debord, 2004, 7) The commodification of the news, as Debord might put it, works towards the disintegration of all community and critical awareness (Debord 2004, 14); towards the stage at which “the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity.” (Ibid., 21) We see Adorno and Horkheimer argue something similar in The Dialectic of Enlightenment in their chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” As they put it, the notion of amusement itself “ha[s] been taken over from above and brought fully up to date” by the culture industry. (Adorno & Horkheimer 2002, 107) For Valdeón, news is today understood mostly as a matter of entertainment; individuals seek information for pleasure (whether in gossip columns, celebrity news, or sports sections), information that is forgotten soon after. Information and translation, Valdeón argues, become mutually interdependent in a globalized, cosmopolitan and consumerist world economy. English thus becomes the Lingua Franca, the key currency of the language of information. As such, “in this brave new world, where information and entertainment have become almost indistinguishable, translation becomes a commodity itself, albeit an invisible one, much more so than in the past.” (Valdeón 2010, 155)

We are beginning here to have a better idea of the interplay between the devaluation of other languages and cultures, the championing of Anglo-American interests and norms, particularly as concerns entertainment and popular culture, and the acceptance of more sinister military ideologies and neoliberal economic policies. Nowhere can a military-industrial agenda be better served than when news and entertainment become indistinguishable. This is particularly the case when informative texts take on a persuasive function. “In some of these texts, the latter will prevail as information is presented in such a manner that it also intends to allure the reader to the product.” (Valdeón 2009, 77) Informative texts such as tourist brochures, Valdeón writes, interact with their readers, and consequently deal with “the translation of information, rather than with the translation of texts (as defended in Venuti 1995, 18) and, very often, with what could be described as product translation. Corporations and institutions are interested in communicating effective messages that may result in product consumption or in habit formation.” (Valdéon 2009, 79) As Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto notes, global capitalism, in an important sense, requires unencumbered, universal translation. And, as Valdeón notes, informative texts differ from other kinds of texts, such as literary works, in that the former are commissioned from the source culture, not the target one. (Ibid., 79) Ironically, the more translation becomes a commodity in facilitating the championing of Anglo-American issues and political positions, neoliberal economic ideologies, and the mass consumerism of American material and cultural products, the more it erases its mediating role. Conversely, rethinking the role translation can play in biocultural sustainability, in fostering an appreciation for minority languages, alternate economies, and local cultures necessitates rethinking the interruptions and resistances can pose to dominant paradigms. And these will only be possible if we situate the visibility of translation otherwise, perhaps from the very periphery of the anonymous and impersonal.

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

Adorno, Theodor W et Max Horkheimer. Dialectic Of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

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News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

Butler, Judith. Frames Of War: When Is Life Grievable?. London & New York: Verso, 2010.

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News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Frames of War in News Translation: Butler and Valdeón

Translation and Globalization

Cronin, Michael. Translation And Globalization. London: Routledge, 2003.

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News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Observation as Critique in Financial Discourse

Society of the Spectacle

Debord, Guy. Society Of The Spectacle. Ken Knabb. London: Rebel Press, 2004.

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News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, And Women: The Reinvention Of Nature . London: Routledge, 1991.

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News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

The world’s languages in crisis

Krauss, Michael. « The World’S Languages In Crisis ». Language 68, no 1 (1992), 4-10.

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News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity

Maffi, Luisa. « Linguistic, Cultural, And Biological Diversity ». Annual Review Of Anthropology, no 34 no 34 (2005).

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News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Sharing a World of Difference: The Earth’s Linguistic, Cultural and Biological Diversity

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove, Luisa Maffi et David Harmon. Sharing A World Of Difference: The Earth’S Linguistic, Cultural And Biological Diversity. Paris: UNESCO, 2003.

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News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Anomalous news translation

Valdeón, Roberto A. « Anomalous News Translation ». Babel 54, no 4 (2008), 299-326.

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Roberto A. Valdeón’s Research on Journalistic Translation (II)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Frames of War in News Translation: Butler and Valdeón

Translating Informative and Persuasive Texts

Valdeón, Roberto A. « Translating Informative And Persuasive Texts ». Perspectives 17, no 2 (2009).

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News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Translation in the informational society

Valdeón, Roberto A. « Translation In The Informational Society ». Across Languages And Cultures 11, no 2 (2010), 149-160.

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Roberto A. Valdeón’s Research on Journalistic Translation (I)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Frames of War in News Translation: Butler and Valdeón

The Translator’s Invisibility

Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’S Invisibility . London: Routledge, 1995.

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News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

René Lemieux — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 20:33:41 +0000

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 process of gatekeeping is also governed by some forces which determine whether or not an item can move into and through the channel. Lewin says that the same gatekeeping process holds true for producing news in news organizations. This analogy made in passing is in fact the original transfer of gatekeeping theory to mass communications and journalism research. In 1950, David Manning White who worked as Lewin’s research assistant at the University of Iowa applied gatekeeping theory to research on mass communications. His article “The Gatekeepers: A Case Study in the Selection of News” later motivated other scholars (e.g., Bass 1969; McNelly 1959; Westley and MacLean 1957; Gieber 1956) to write on the topic.

Lewin’s concept of force is probably the most complex concept in his theory. In the early studies on news gatekeeping process, several factors are considered as forces behind the decisions made by individual gatekeepers. For instance, White (1950) views personal subjectivity as the force governing the gatekeeping process; or, Gieber (1956) considers institutions and their routines as influential factors. In this respect, a more holistic view is offered by Shoemaker (1991, 75) who asserts that whereas the decision to select, discard and shape the news message in a particular way can be influenced by the gatekeepers’ personal values, individual gatekeepers are not totally autonomous in the process of decision making. In fact, they work within the constraints of communication routines of organizations which are themselves influenced by forces from outside of the organization. He also adds that, “none of these actors – the individual, the routine, the organization, or the social institution – can escape the fact that it is tied to and draws its sustenance from the social system” (Shoemaker 1991, 75).

According to Shoemaker et al. (2001, 234; see also Shoemaker and Reese 1996), studying gatekeeping in communication context can be done on five levels of analysis, i.e. individuals, routines of communication work, organizational characteristics, social institutions, and societies. The factors mentioned by Shoemaker et al. (2001) are in fact the forces influencing the process of news gatekeeping. It should be noted, however, that these factors are not of equal influential power. Whereas individual subjectivity may have the minimum impact, socio-political systems can be said to have the maximum influence on the gatekeepers’ decisions.

In addition to mass communications and journalism, Lewin’s gatekeeping theory has been applied to research in other disciplines, such as management and information science (Barzilai‐Nahon 2008). In translation studies, the gatekeeping metaphor has been widely used in the study of news translation (e.g., Valdeón 2014; Cheesman and Nohl 2011; Fujii 1988). The relevance of gatekeeping theory to the study of news translation is due to the role that translation plays in international news gatekeeping process. This role has been acknowledged by Bass (1969) who proposes a two-segment news processing model.

Figure 1: Double-Action Internal News Flow (Bass 1969)

In this model, the process of news flow is divided into two segments, i.e. news gathering and news processing. At the stage of news gathering, a news copy is produced and then transmitted across the news room or across the world to the news processors whose task is to edit, translate and modify the news copy for local needs on the basis of certain policies (Bass 1969, 72). As can be inferred from the model, translation is a part of news processing action and translators can be considered as individual gatekeepers whose decisions influence the final news product.

In the study of news translation, it could be said that gatekeeping theory has not been used to its full potential. The process of translation in global news organizations can be better described by employing the fundamental concepts of Lewin’s gatekeeping theory (i.e. channel, gate, etc.). In fact, translation is a channel through which information reaches audiences in different linguistic communities. The selection of a particular message for translation and the transformation of the message in particular ways are carried out at the gate sections of the translation channel, which are controlled by ideological forces. Also, Lewin’s idea that “changing the food habits of a family is equivalent to changing the food that moves through [the] channel” (1947, 144) is useful for describing the significance of the role that translation plays in controlling the flow of information. Shaping the worldview of a society can be said to be equivalent to shaping the information that its members receive every day, and translation is the main channel of shaping information in the course of foreign-language news text production.

In my Ph.D. thesis – Describing Translations of Political News Texts (in progress) – I draw on Lewin’s gatekeeping theory, among other theoretical tools, to deal with the conceptual problems of research on news translation. Applying more thoroughly the gatekeeping theory to the study of news translation could contribute to a better conceptualization of the translation process in news organizations. It could also accentuate the role of translation in directing the public perception of social, political and economic realities.

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

gatekeeping

journalisme

traduction

Toward a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control

Barzilai‐Nahon, Karine. « Toward A Theory Of Network Gatekeeping: A Framework For Exploring Information Control ». Journal Of The American Society For Information Science And Technology 59, no 9 (2008), 1493-1512.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

Refining the “gatekeeper” concept: A UN radio case study

Bass, Abraham Z. « Refining The “Gatekeeper” Concept: A Un Radio Case Study ». Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 46, no 1 (1969), 69-72.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

Many voices, one BBC World Service? The 2008 US elections, gatekeeping and trans-editing

Cheesman, Tom, Arnd-Michael Nohl et BBC WSUSElec Group. « Many Voices, One Bbc World Service? The 2008 Us Elections, Gatekeeping And Trans-Editing ». Journalism 12, no 2 (2011), 217-233.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

News translation in Japan

Fujii, Akio. « News Translation In Japan ». Meta: Journal Des Traducteurs/meta:translators’ Journal 33, no 1 (1988), 32-37.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

Across the desk: A study of 16 telegraph editors

Gieber, Walter. « Across The Desk: A Study Of 16 Telegraph Editors ». Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 33, no 4 (1956), 423-432.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

Frontiers in group dynamics II. Channels of group life: Social planning and action research

Lewin, Kurt. « Frontiers In Group Dynamics Ii. Channels Of Group Life: Social Planning And Action Research ». Human Relations, no 1 no 1 (1947), 143-153.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

Intermediary communicators in the international flow of news

McNelly, John T. « Intermediary Communicators In The International Flow Of News ». Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 36, no 1 (1959), 23-26.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

Individual and routine forces in gatekeeping

Shoemaker, Pamela J, Martin Eichholz, Eunyi Kim et Brenda Wrigley. « Individual And Routine Forces In Gatekeeping ». Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78, no 2 (2001), 233-246.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

Mediating the message. Theories of influences on mass media content

Shoemaker, Pamela J et Stephen D Reese. Mediating The Message. Theories Of Influences On Mass Media Content. 2nd editionᵉ éd. New York: Longman, 1996.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

Gatekeeping

Shoemaker, Pamela J. Gatekeeping. Communication Concepts 3. Newbury Park: Sage, 1991.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

From adaptation to appropriation: Framing the world through news translation

Valdeón, Roberto A. « From Adaptation To Appropriation: Framing The World Through News Translation ». Linguaculture, no 1 no 1 (2014), 51-62.

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Roberto A. Valdeón’s Research on Journalistic Translation (II)

Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

A conceptual model for communications research

Westley, Bruce H et Malcolm S MacLean. « A Conceptual Model For Communications Research ». Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 34, no 1 (1957), 31-38.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

The gate keeper: A case study in the selection of news

White, David Manning. « The Gate Keeper: A Case Study In The Selection Of News ». Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 27, no 4 (1950), 383.

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Translation Channel in News Gatekeeping Process

Frames of War in News Translation: Butler and Valdeón

René Lemieux — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 14:43:42 +0000

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. Valdeón, however, I want to pick out a few points on these frames are articulated and rearticulated in translation, how translation can serve to both confirm a dominant ideology concerning the justifiability of warfare, but also prepare the grounds for its contestation.

Butler’s book examines “the ways in which visual and discursive fields are part of war recruitment and war waging.” Against some of the academic stances taken in Critical Discourse Analysis I covered in an earlier post, which, as Valdeón recalls “had no real impact on the society it aims to change, or, at least, contribute to change” (Valdeón 2008, 301), Butler immediately adds that

the point is not merely descriptive but critical and oppositional… If war is to be opposed, we have to understand how popular assent to war is cultivated and maintained, in other words, how war waging acts upon the senses so that war is thought to be an inevitability, something good, or even a source of moral satisfaction. (FoW ix)

Butler’s major concern in this book is to inquire into how visual, discursive and narrative technologies manufacture assent to war through their framing of the issues at hand. The frame, she writes, “does not simply exhibit reality, but actively participates in a strategy of containment, selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality.” (FoW xiii) Frames importantly operate by determining who’s in and who’s out with respect to moral considerability and grievability, and I’m interested here in how the ‘who’s out’ gets reiterated in the aporetics of translation, and where translation can stand as an act of resistance. While most of Butler’s arguments concern photography here (the Abu Ghraib photos, for example), she is also quite attentive to the news media through which the frames of war are reiterated.

Television coverage of war positions citizens as visual consumers of a violent conflict that happens elsewhere, at least in the United States where geographical distance from our so-called enemies allows us to wage war without close domestic scrutiny of our actions. It may be that global media operations like CNN actually export the perspective of the US, enforcing a sense of infinite distance from zones of war even for those who live in the midst of violence. But if the framing of what we see challenges the credibility of the claims made about war, then we fail to be effectively recruited into the war effort of the news. (FoW xv)

Roberto A. Valdeón is a figure at the forefront of the study of news and informative texts in translation who makes considerable use of the notion of framing in his work. Framing is itself a key concept in communications studies, “defined as the central organizing idea that allows news consumers to make sense of events” (Valdeón 2015, “(Un)stable sources…”, 440). Frames, as Valdeón draws from Lakoff and Castels, are “not a question of words, but a ‘mode of thought, a mode of action.’… The media use existing frames to promote connections in the minds of the readers” (Valdeón 2016, 15). The notion of framing also has an important history in translation studies, as Valdeón illustrates via Mona Baker’s Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. Framing, he writes, “implies an active participation in the construction of reality (Baker 2006: 106), or the construction of certain construes of reality.” (Valdeón 2008, 300) No frame is ever given once and for all, however, and depends on its continued and repeated reiteration for its survival. As an important means through which a given frame may survive – or not – translation is extremely well positioned, I argue, in re-framing otherwise the media discourses through which war is constructed as necessary and justifiable.

Some particularly important aspects of framing in news translation for Valdeón, following Baker, involve ‘labelling,’ the choices writers and translators make to portray an issue in a certain light. ‘Ambiguity,’ however, allows news writes to present “the same set of events… in different ways… violent conflicts can be framed as war, civil war, terrorism, etc.” (Valdeón 2008, 300) ‘Selective appropriation,’ finally, concerns the omissions or additions made by writers and translators “to suppress, accentuate or elaborate particular aspects of a narrative.” (ibid., 301) Valdeón thus proposes to relate framing to “the mechanisms that journalists resort to in order to produce source texts which, in turn, can also affect the selection and de-selection processes undertaken by news producers when relying on articles published in other languages.” (Valdeón 2015, “(Un)stable sources…”, 440)

Valdeón’s thesis is that the framing that occurs in news translation participates in the construction of a world “according to Anglophone norms, interests and, most likely, ideological agendas” (ibid., 323). I’ll have more to say about the ecolinguistic and biocultural aspects of news in translation in my next post, along with the question of language death, and will stick to the question of war here. English expressions, for example, become the norm in framing global conflicts. “For instance, the creation of the narrative of the ‘War on Terror’ (Baker 2006), with its ideological implications, has been exported to other languages (i.e., the Spanish press often uses the phrase ‘la guerra contra el terror.’) (Valdeón 2010, 155) Particularly with respect to the term ‘terrorism,’ Valdeón writes, the major Western news agencies “set the agenda for the smaller ones, let alone regional and local media” (Valdeón 2012, 860).

War news, Valdeón writes, was the staple diet of the early newspapers, all of which heavily relied on translation (see Valdeón’s paper on the Dutch Corantos, 2012), citing a 1693 English article from the London Gazette quoted from French sources. As he writes, “war news was often used to project negative images of the Other.” (Valdeón 2015, “Fifteen years…”, 637) More current studies of ideological biases introduced by means of translation in the news have examined “the ways in which translation has shaped the audience’s views of such a momentous news event as the Falklands War” (ibid., 640). In his own work, Valdeón has studied the role played by translation in accounts of the Basque separatist group ETA with respect to terrorism in the British Broadcasting Corporation, writing that “the same actors of the news event, as well as their actions, can be referred to as ‘separatist’ or ‘terrorist’ depending on the medium and language we are dealing with.” (Valdeón 2008, 300)

It seems to me that an obstacle not only to the study of news in Translation Studies, but to an appreciation of the ethical and political role translators can play in re-framing the questions of global warfare is indeed the marginalization and invisibility of translation. Valdeón notes, from his interviews with a number of news translators, that many do not see themselves as translators, but see their work as marginal or secondary. Indeed, the information age has further exacerbated this invisibility towards, as he cites David Bellos, “anonymity and impersonality.” (Valdeón 2015, “Fifteen years…” 636) But this dimension of the anonymous and the impersonal, familiar to readers of Blanchot, Deleuze and Foucault, is also that of the excluded; that which lies beyond the frame, and onto which every translation opens in its re-framing.

The potential for resisting the frames of war might thus lie in rethinking translation in the information society. This appears to be along the lines of what Valdeón cites from Baumann et al. concerning “the subversive nature of the translators as agents of resistance or change.” (Valdeón 2015, “(Un)stable sources…”, 444) Valdeón again seems to hint at something like Blanchot’s concept of the anonymous and impersonal neuter or third person, drawing from Homi Bhabha in proposing a Third Space, “a crucial point at which the news company, the writer/translator and the ultimate reader can meet without feeling that their political, cultural and linguistic backgrounds have been undermined by those of others.” (Valdeón 2008, 323)

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