Compiling, Rewriting and Recycling: The Changing Face of Translation in the TV Newsroom Claire Tsai Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies University of Warwick Abstract Taking the author’s prior experience in the print and broadcast newsroom as a starting point, this paper explores the complexity of TV news translation and the conflict around terminology and the translation activity itself. Can the translated news text be considered a translation, an adaptation or simply a news report? Some scholars look at news translation strictly from the translational point of view and assert that all source texts undergo transformations by way of editing and rewriting, which are simply more salient in news translation due to particular production constraints and goals typical of news translation. This paper argues that it is exactly the particularity of broadcast journalism that makes TV news translation further removed from translation as we understand the term. By adapting Teun Adrianus van Dijk’s discourse analytical approach to data collected at Formosa Television in Taiwan, the paper examines the translated TV news items and the interplay of the visual with the verbal at the textual and contextual levels. The paper also looks at the case of translating multiple sources into one news item and asks whether the material used and generally regarded as ‘the rough note’ by TV news translators constitutes a source text at all in the translation sense. It is the aim of this paper to bring to light how and to what extent a TV news translator is constrained and whether such an activity is as freewheeling as it appears to be.

It all starts with questions In the television newsroom where news is constantly updated and deadlines are the norm, the role of the news translator is increasingly important in the presentation of international news and in shaping the local audience’s knowledge of the world. As Gurevitch, Levy and Roeh (1993, p. 214-215) indicate: “Television news in different countries, feeding on an increasingly similar global diet, facilitated by a global system of distribution and exchange of news materials, still speak in many different voices. The Global Newsroom is still confronted by a Tower of Babel”. In researching television news translation, it is noticeable that a number of questions have been touched upon from time to time, but are not explored in any depth. How do we define “news translation”? There are a range of options if a translator working in the newsroom is trying to

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adopt an appropriate job title on his/her business card: editor/translator, transeditor (Stetting, 1988) writer, rewriter, adapter, complier/translator, journalist, or simply “news translator” as an umbrella term to cover every eventuality. In translation studies, various designations are attached to the concept of translation: adaptation, transadaptation, versioning, localisation, customisation, domestication, transfer, language consultancy and more recently Maria Tymoczko’s (2007) “*translation” which prefaces the word translation with an asterisk to represent any cross-cultural notion of translation. This terminological confusion is also in evidence within the area of news translation. Labels like adaptation, localisation, domestication and transedition, as noted earlier, are present in discussions of news translation. These terms are invented due to the fact that either the definition of translation is not wide enough to accommodate these activities or these activities are indeed divorced from the concept of translation. Jeremy Munday (2001, p. 46) voices his concern that an overabundance of terminology leads to resistance to the advancement of translation theory. What concerns the present study is not whether terminological confusion weakens conceptualisations of translation, but rather whether these terms are indeed redundant if the aims and objectives of the interdiscipline of Translation Studies have been to expand its width and depth of application. The use of “transedition” or “adaptation” does not make much difference in terms of theorising TV news translation. Both terms claim to cover the grey area between translating, editing and adapting. What makes TV news translation different from other kinds of translation is that there is not always a single source. More fundamentally, it involves the fast-paced compilation, reprocessing and recycling of a multiplicity of sources including verbal, visual and other text varieties. The translator quickly scans the myriad of sources available and decides what to save for a broadcast rewrite within a very tight deadline. For instance, in an item on the APEC Summit aired on 6 September 2007 by Taiwan’s Formosa Television, more than nine verbal and visual source texts were used. The usage of multiple sources makes the dichotomy between the source and the target even more blurred. The history of writing about translation contains countless discussions concerning the freedom a translator may or may not have to diverge significantly from the source. If debates about the freedom of the translator do not have any relevance in the context of news translation as Susan Bassnett (2005, p. 125) proposes, then just how free is the newsroom translator?

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Message manipulation vs freedom In an essay on news translation, Akio Fujii (1988, p. 37) pinpoints the nub of the whole issue of news translation: “Such large-scale message manipulation certainly goes beyond the work of mere translation”. In the foreign desk where agency news wires go through the process of being reshaped, edited and synthesised, strictly literal translation finds no place. Discussions of equivalence and faithfulness between the source and the target become irrelevant here. A news story which runs over three minutes in length on CNN can be rewritten into a news item shorter than one minute in any given television newsroom in Taiwan, an item that fits into the speech community’s linguistic and journalistic prescriptions. The Glasgow Media Group (1981, p. 92) associates such compression of information on television with the common professional assumption, i.e. even “50 seconds is a long time” for broadcast news. News editing strategies, aiming at achieving clarity, brevity, language standardisation and news value, are sometimes operated unconsciously (Bell, 1991, p. 71). It is arguable if this unconsciousness in the news editing process accounts for a certain degree of freedom, for Bell again points out that becoming too aware of the precise operations performed risks paralysing the newsroom (1991, p. 72). In the process of translating television news, where language transformation and manipulation are allowed, the more freedom a translator enjoys, the more effort is needed to negotiate between the two languages and cultures given the constraints and complexity involved in the process. It would be possible to argue that newsroom translators in Taiwan, in general, have a good control of their work and can be quite interventionist. After all, as Walter Lippmann (1922, p. 222) puts it so vividly: “Without standardization, without stereotypes, without routine judgments, without a fairly ruthless disregard of subtlety, the editor would soon die of excitement”. Case studies The study of TV news translation should concentrate primarily on the entire discourse of a news item rather than on the constituent parts of a sentence or a paragraph on the grounds that the main task of the TV news translator hinges on how to construct and write a news story

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conforming to journalistic norms and practices rather than contemplating constantly how to transfer a word or a sentence or even a whole paragraph into another language. This argument is supported by Teun Adrianus van Dijk (1988, p.26) when he states: “We seem to operate only on what may be called a microlevel of description: sound, words, sentence patterns, and their meanings. We also need a description at a more comprehensive, global level, that is of whole parts of discourse, or of entire discourses”. It is exactly the whole of the discourse that makes the analysis of TV news translation relevant and meaningful. Van Dijk (1988, p. 26) further proposes the notion of macrosemantics and macrostructures which allow for the defining of summarisation at all stages of newsmaking, which is realised by the application of the macro-rules of deletion, generalisation and construction to reduce information of a text to its basics (1988, p. 32). The imperative to find corresponding pictures to support narration is reflected in the superiority of footage in TV news selection and broadcast newswriting where the journalist lets the pictures speak for themselves. A typical example can be found a day after the death of the Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti. The news translator produced one item dedicated to him by combining three different versions of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” found on YouTube at the unusual length of approximately three minutes. In Taiwan, the average length of an international news story is one minute and ten seconds. Under exceptional circumstances, the story runs for as long as one minute and thirty seconds. The three-minute item on Pavarotti was produced for such a special occasion only. The very touching music dominated the news story with narration sporadically embedded, the latter lasting around 18 seconds. The news translator basically wrote to the music video without basing her writing on any written source texts. The five sentences embedded in the music-based news item, as translated into English by myself, are: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Pavarotti’s version of Puccini’s Nessun Dorma is particularly tempting. Carreras has sung Nessun Dorma before. It is touching that one almost forgets to breathe. Paul Potts, the Brit, who worked in a cell phone company, moved a judge to tears in a singing contest.1 5. There’s some kind of magic in Pavarotti’s voice.

1

Paul Potts was the winner of the British television show “Britain’s Got Talent” in 2007. His version of Nessun Dorma has been well-received in Taiwan and around the world.

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The extent of freedom of the TV news translator in the process of transformations varies in different cases. The second example illustrated here has more to do with the news translator’s imagination and creativity. With a view to promoting greater enjoyment of viewing, journalists often resort to various strategies, including visual aesthetics, fast-paced narration and “obtrusive voice tone” (Grabe et al., 2000, p. 586). The item on the 10th birthday of the British children’s programme Teletubbies was supplied by Reuters Television (RTV) on September 2007. RTV provided footage, approximately two minutes in length, of the celebration taking place in the streets of London with very limited natural sound and a written TV script (see Appendix 1). When the item was passed on to the news translator it was transformed into a lively report. What Taiwanese viewers heard at the very beginning of the story was the widely known Teletubbies’ theme song in Chinese chanted by the news translator herself followed by the story as a voice-over read out by the same news translator in an intimate tone. By adding and singing this approximately 12-second bit, the news translator aimed to conjure up a personal relationship with the audience and to imprint the item vividly on their memory. This powerful form of expression on the part of the news translator is apparently driven by the Taiwan broadcast media’s increasing orientation towards market-driven journalism. The dramatic beginning did not appear in the RTV script or footage. It is the news translator who created this segment. Taking a closer look at RTV’s source text, it is noticeable that almost 80% of the text has been deleted by the news translator. In an original written script consisting of approximately 180 English words, the only portions left for processing to be included in the final report were these few highlighted parts:
“… they strolled through London to celebrate their tenth birthday”
“… stepped out of their … home Teletubbyland…”
“During their rare appearance, children rushed to hug the cuddly giants who have been played by the same four actors in costume….” To say that TV news translation is a result of the news translator’s imagination seems too arbitrary. The RTV script and the theme of the final report still revolved around the macrostructure of the Teletubbies’ celebration of their 10th birthday, but clear stylistic reformulation and addition had taken place in the production of the final report. Despite conventional journalistic norms to stress the importance of impartiality and objectivity, it is not uncommon for the news translator to add comments not expressed in the sources of the story. Interestingly

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enough, near 80% of the final item was actually written, not translated, by the news translator. According to the news translator’s reflection (personal interview, 7 September 2007), the process of writing up this final broadcast report was mostly triggered by her imagination and creativity: “I flipped through the footage first to have an idea of what pictures are available for editing, had a quick skim of the RTV script and then put them all away and started ‘handling’ the story. At this moment, I’d already had a mental picture as to how I was going to construct the story. The verbal and visual source texts were rough notes, so to speak, which I could refer to when necessary”. Notice that the entire last paragraph in the RTV script disappeared from the FTV version altogether and that the news translator used various other related sources on the same subject from the internet and from other available reports in Chinese. A more extreme example is provided by the Gay Parade in Australia in 2006 (see Appendix 2) demonstrating how the notion of translation is challenged. The news wire containing 236 English words was transformed into Chinese in just four sentences, translated into English by myself:
The Mardi Gras Parade kicks off in Australia today.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard and many other politicians become a mockery.
Let’s have a look.
Thank you for watching and good night. The lead ended here and the footage continued until the next commercial break. A comparison between the source text and the target text shows some interesting points. “The Mardi Gras Parade kicks off in Australia today” does not even appear in the original version. The then Australian Prime Minister John Howard is only shown in the footage in a mocking way. At no stage is this “translation” based on the RTV script. In this case, the news translator summarised the story by flipping through the moving pictures. Given that this rendition was tacked on at the end of the newscast to fill leftover time, the translator made it convenient for the anchor to end the newscast by adding “Good Night”.

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Conclusion It can be argued that this is a form of rewriting, an equivalent or derivation of translation, but the central point of the whole issue lies in the degree of transformation. When there is no longer a direct transformation of the sources but rather the production of a new text, it is questionable to consider this a translation. For those who argue that everything is translation, these examples are considered translations. Or are they? The claim that everything is translation does not take us anywhere in terms of theorising translation. In his 2007 article objecting to the notion of cultural translation, Harish Trivedi (2007, p. 285) warns against the “catachrestic” use of the term translation. Trivedi vehemently questions the effectiveness of taking translation metaphorically without involving two texts and languages, or even any text at all. There must be something beyond different labels of translation and translation studies that is better able to account for the kind of verbal and visual transaction taking place in the TV newsroom. Let us not forget what Anthony Pym (2004, p. 89) reminds us: “Effective translation rarely obeys the NANS [No-Addition-NoSubtraction] principle, but it must nevertheless depend on some reasonable relationship between the quantities involved”. If this reasonable relationship does not exist where the definition of translation has been expanded to its limits, it is conceivable that reasonable doubts about any translation would be raised. These examples seem to confirm that TV news translation is very much divorced from a conventional understanding of the term “translation” and raise the contentious issue of the binary opposition of the source and the target text in the field of Translation Studies. As a practitioner and a researcher, this author argues that Translation Studies is not the only answer to the full conceptualisation of this kind of TV news writing. Given that translation is a constituent and integral part of the whole broadcast newsmaking process, to theorise TV news translation, journalism has to play a much more significant role than it does now. This perspective is endorsed by Esperança Bielsa (2007, p.151) in her recent empirical investigation into translation in global news agencies: “News translation is subject to the norms that regulate news production in general and falls within the range of expertise of those trained and specialised in the production of news: the journalists”.

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To date, we have not been able to speak of a uniform field of audiovisual and multimedia Translation Studies. Debates about defining translation in the TV newsroom will not come to an end in the near future. Some may argue that such debates are simply terminological quibbles, but it is important to identify what our object of research into news translation really is. Otherwise, we are moving further from, not closer to an answer in theorising TV news translation. Bibliography Bassnet, S. (2005) Bringing the News Back Home: Strategies of Acculturation and Foreignization. Language and Intercultural Communication, 5, 120-30. Bell, A. (1991) The language of news media, Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Bielsa, E. (2007) Translation in global news agencies. Target, 19, 135-55. Fujii, A. (1988) News translation in Japan. Meta, XXXIII, 32-7. Glasgow University Media, G. (1981) Bad news, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. Grabe, M. E., Zhou, S., Lang, A. & Bolls, P. D. (2000) Packaging Television news: The effects of tabloid on information processing and evaluative responses. Journal of broadcasting & Electronic Media, Fall, 581-98. Gurevitch, M., Levy, M. R. & Roeh, I. (1993) The Global Newsroom: convergences and diversities in the globalization of television news. In Dahlgren, P. & Sparks, C. (Eds.) Communication and citizenship: journalism and the public sphere. London, Routledge. Lippmann, W. (1922) Public opinion, New York; London, Free Press Paperbacks. Munday, J. (2001) Introducing translation studies: theories and applications, London, Routledge. Pym, A. (2004) The moving text: Localization, translation, and distribution, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company. Stetting, K. (1989) Transediting- A New Term for Coping with the Grey Area Between Editing and Translating. In Graham Caie, E. A. (Ed.) Proceedings from the Fourth Nordic Conference for English Studies. Copenhagen, Department of English, University of Copenhagen. Trivedi, H. (2007) Translating culture vs. cultural translation. In St-Pierre, P. & Kar, P. C. (Eds.) In translation: reflections, refractions, transformations. Amsterdam; Philadelphia, John Benjamins Pub. Tymoczko, M. (2007) Enlarging translation, empowering translators, Manchester, UK; Kinderhook, NY, St. Jerome Pub. Van Dijk, T. A. (1988) News as discourse, Hillsdale, NJ, L. Erlbaum Associates.

Appendix 1: RTV video script of the Mardi Gras Parade in Australia (4 March 2006) Thousands of Australians crammed Sydney's tiny gay quarter to applaud half-naked cowboys, gay rugby players and other scantily-dressed marchers in the city's annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade on Saturday (March 4). Armed with picnic baskets, blankets and beer, onlookers lined the parade's 1.6 km (1 mile) route

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cheering the 6,000 participants and 120 colourful floats, many loosely adopting the theme of this year's Oscar-hopeful blockbuster "Brokeback Mountain", Ang Lee's saga of gay cowboys. The cowboys competed for applause from the crowd with themes including bare-chested men hula dancing in Hawaiian grass skirts and a lesbian motorcycle club. Many people been waiting hours to secure the best positions along the route. The parade began in 1978 to protest a ban on homosexuality in Australia, but has become more hedonistic over the years. Homosexuality was decriminalised in Australia in 1984. One boisterous group of marchers promoted "bisexuality and paganism", while another implored onlookers to take pride in their leather. A float titled "Friends of Dick Cheney" featured a nod to the U.S. Vice President who has stood by his lesbian daughter and is at odds with President George W. Bush about the need for a U.S. constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriages. Revellers traditionally carry on long into the night after the parade with police warning against public drunkenness and buying drugs from illegal street peddlers. Parade organisers estimated the size of the crowd at around 450,000.

Appendix 2: RTV video script of the 10th birthday of the Teletubbies (3 September 2007) The Teletubbies received a warm welcome from fans big and small on Monday (September 3) as they strolled through London to celebrate their tenth birthday. Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po, the characters of a hit kids' programme stepped out of their usual home Teletubbyland, to take a walk around some of London's most iconic landmarks such as Big Ben and Tower Bridge. During their rare appearance, children rushed to hug the cuddly giants who have been played by the same four actors in costume for the past 10 years: Simon Shelton (Tinky Winky), John Simmit (Dipsy), Nikky Smedley (Laa-Laa) and Pui Fan Lee (Po). The programme, featuring the colourful characters living in a futuristic dome (the "Tubbytronic Superdome"), aired between 1997 and 2001. Despite it being aimed at very young children, the show was also a roaring success among adults receiving cult status particularly among university students. The show's theme song also became hugely popular, reaching number 1 in the UK Singles Chart in December 1997 and remained in the Top 75 for 32 weeks, selling over a million copies.

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