Crossing Cultural Barriers in International News Transmission: A Translational Approach

Crossing Cultural Barriers in International News Transmission: A Translational Approach Erkka Vuorinen This paper aims to introduce a research projec...
Author: Audra Freeman
28 downloads 0 Views 76KB Size
Crossing Cultural Barriers in International News Transmission: A Translational Approach Erkka Vuorinen

This paper aims to introduce a research project dealing with the translation of international news and, in particular, the cultural transfer/transformation involved. It will sketch an outline of the various elements playing a role in news production, based on source materials supplied by the international news agencies in languages that differ from the one in which the news is ultimately presented to the consumer. It will also discuss why little research into this field has been done, why it is nevertheless useful and how it can be done. In the paper, news translation is looked at from the point of view of a small, semiperipheral country, Finland.

1. Background Lacking the resources needed to comprehensively cover events and developments in different parts of the globe, the great majority of countries in the world are heavily dependent on foreign, primarily Western, news services. Finland, a country of five million people in the north of Europe, can serve as an example. According to some estimates (Kivikuru 1986), about 20 per cent of all news material — and about one third of other mass communication material — published and broadcast in Finland comes from the Anglo-American world. In addition to this, the Finnish mass media use news material originating in still other cultures and areas of the world, albeit to a lesser extent. Consequently, the Finnish media, like the media in other non-Englishspeaking nations, daily publish a considerable amount of news material which has been originally produced in foreign cultures and languages and which must be translated for the recipient audience. It is therefore completely justified to say that news translation may significantly affect people’s perception and interpretation of the surrounding world. Despite this fact, news translation as a field of translational and editorial activity has been largely ignored both in journalism/mass communication studies and in translation studies. For instance, while reading text books or other works and writings dealing with journalism, the media and international mass communication, one very soon discovers that they typically either completely ignore translation or do not discuss it in any

Cross-cultural News Transmission

detail. A case in point is Allan Bell’s book dealing with the language of the news media (1991). Bell writes that [...] much of the world’s news undergoes a process far more radical than editing within the same language. Translation between languages is a major language function of the international agencies. (1991: 66) Yet this is practically all Bell has to say about translation, and he fails to elaborate on what the “radical process” actually involves. As part of her study dealing with the role of mass communication in peripheral nations, Ullamaija Kivikuru (1990: 309-328) studies the coverage of two news topics by international and national news agencies during one day, and the gatekeeping processes at work in international news transmission. In connection with this, she also investigates the news items produced and published on the two topics by Finnish and Tanzanian news agencies and media, and compares these with the original news material. However, because of her predominantly macrolevel research interests and emphases, the very limited scope of text comparison and her failure to give examples, Kivikuru manages to say relatively little about translation as one of the gatekeeping processes1. Alongside complete neglect or superficial statements, a survey of the literature on journalism and mass communication also reveals certain typical attitudes towards translation: in cases where it is mentioned, translation is often (a) seen as an obstacle or quantitative “gate” reducing news flow (e.g. BoydBarrett 1980); (b) considered a source of errors and inaccuracy (Bell 1984); or (c) taken more or less for granted (e.g. van Dijk 1988b). As far as the field of translation studies is concerned, not a great deal more has been said about news translation. Akio Fujii, in his interesting article (1988), discusses the translation of Japanese news into English. Taking the well-known Westley-McLean model of the mass communication process as his point of departure, he formulates a gatekeeping model of news translation and identifies four gatekeeping functions performed by news translators: controlling the quantity of the message, message transformation, message supplementation, and message reorganization. A.F. Abu-Ssaydeh (1991) investigates the language of political news in the Arabic press and tries to determine how and to what extent Western news has — through translation — influenced the Arabic language at the lexical, structural, organizational and stylistic levels. Further, Boniface Byarugaba (1990) discusses the working conditions of Tanzanian journalists and their unrecognized work as translators. 1

Nevertheless, her qualitative analysis does give some idea about how and why news items may undergo changes on their way to the target recipient (see section 2.2., below).

62

Erkka Vuorinen

In Finland, finally, news translation and its organization and special characteristics have mainly been dealt with in a number of master’s theses produced in departments of translation studies (e.g. Leino and Rantala 1989; Kukkonen 1989; Vuorinen 1990; Offor 1993). Also related to news translation is Inkeri Vehmas-Lehto’s doctoral dissertation (1989), which deals with Finnish translations of Russian journalistic texts, focusing on their linguistic and stylistic features and problems. Why, then, is news translation a subject that does not seem to generate interest among either scholars or practitioners in the fields of journalism/mass communication and translation? One explanation could be that news translation is to a large extent a centralized activity. In other words, despite the huge volume of translation being carried out, the number of organizations and individuals engaged in it is relatively small. Consequently, translation work remains “hidden” from even the majority of journalists working for the various media. In Finland, for example, the Finnish News Agency (STT) handles most of the news translation into Finnish and Swedish2 done in the country, thus sparing the client media the trouble.3 As a result, many journalists seldom have to face the question of translation. Second, there may be some confusion concerning the nature and role of translation in the context of news transmission. For instance, Fujii, at the end of his article, concludes that performing different gatekeeping operations (see above) “goes beyond the work of mere translation”, and that these operations “could well elevate the status of an English-language news reporter from that of the translator to at least that of a ‘copy desk’” (1988: 37). Hence, Fujii implies that translation does not — or should not — involve any gatekeeping operations, and secondly that it occupies a lower status in the editorial hierarchy than news editing. Similar views have also been recorded by Finnish students who have interviewed the editorial staff at the Finnish News Agency: the journalists at STT often claim that the agency does not actually “translate” foreign news material, but produces news stories “based on foreign news” (see e.g. Kukkonen 1989; Offor 1993). Translation tends to be perceived as 2

3

That STT also translates news into Swedish has to do with the fact that Swedish is the second official language in Finland. STT forwards the services of four major international news agencies: Reuters, AFP, Itar-Tass and dpa. In addition, it provides translated material from a number of smaller news agencies, such as the Swedish TT and the Norwegian NTB. Besides STT’s services, some of the biggest Finnish media companies, such as the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yleisradio), the daily newspapers Helsingin Sanomat, Aamulehti, Turun Sanomat, Hufvudstadsbladet, and the afternoon papers IltaSanomat and Iltalehti, also subscribe to foreign news services not provided by STT. Moreover, some members of the media, such as Helsingin Sanomat, subscribe directly to services that are also provided by STT.

63

Cross-cultural News Transmission

essentially a linguistic transcoding operation — and as such it is a phenomenon of little interest to journalists and journalism/mass communication scholars. It could be that, at least from the point of view of the more normative approaches to translation emphasizing the supremacy of the source text, foreign news processing, which may involve various editing functions, does not seem to fit within the scope of “translation proper”. Therefore, there may be a reluctance to include it among the subjects of translation research.4 Also, since news translation is characteristically embedded in a complex institutional setting and a long series of text processing operations, there may be too many variables for normative approaches to be able to account for them. Finally, news is often seen as a transculturally standardized product. This is clearly reflected in the suggestion made recently in Finland that one of the possible future applications of machine translation could be the translation of Finnish news items for foreign readers (Arnola in Röyskö 1994). Such ideas concerning the standardized form, structure and even content of news items, together with the underlying narrow conception of translation, may give rise to the belief that there is not really anything worth studying in the area of news translation. Everything considered, the problem with narrow and normative conceptions of translation is that they often try to define the scope of translation a priori, instead of first analyzing real-life intercultural and interlingual communication, such as news translation. As a result, they easily end up being unsuitable for the description of many actual translational phenomena, and, as such, being of limited use (see Delabastita 1989: 214). By emphasizing the primary importance of the source text in translation, they tend to neglect translation’s fundamentally culture-, context- and situation-bound nature and hence the various extratextual factors governing translation, such as the different sociocultural and institutional settings (see Mossop 1990), the specific translation assignment, the various parties playing a role in the translation situation, etc. Taking these factors into account inevitably works against the basic premises of normative, source-text oriented approaches. In practical terms this means, for instance, that despite significant similarities in news texts published in various countries and cultures of the world (see van Dijk 1988b) it is an overoptimistic fallacy to believe that news could cross linguistic and cultural barriers — even when these are barriers between cultures with close ties and contacts — without changes in content, style, perspective, focus, etc. (see section 2.2.).

4

Cf. Dirk Delabastita (1989), who discusses the reluctance of translation studies to include film translation among its subjects of study.

64

Erkka Vuorinen

2. Outline of a study on news translation My project focuses on the cultural aspects of news translation from English into Finnish; on what the cultural transfer/transformation looks like and what it entails. The outline is divided into three sections: first, I shall discuss some of the basic assumptions underlying my research project; secondly, I shall deal with the objectives and key questions of the research; and finally, I shall address some methodological questions.

2.1. Some basic assumptions As has been mentioned above, news translation as a text processing operation is embedded in a complex institutional setting and a long series of other text processing operations. Therefore, my conviction is that a general, essentially action-theoretical model of translation is required. The designation “actiontheoretical” in this context means that both the process and the product of translation are seen to be parts of a more general goal-oriented action, much in the same way as Justa Holz-Mänttäri views them in her doctoral dissertation Translatorisches Handeln (1984). Hence, translation is seen as a highly situation-bound activity in which the translator finds him/herself within a “field” constituted by a great variety of governing factors (cultural, institutional, communicative and other factors) shaping his/her work. These interdependent, interactive, and in some cases mutually counteractive governing factors can appear in a virtually infinite number of different constellations, and they include both general translational norms, in Gideon Toury’s (1980) sense (see also Hermans 1991), and more situation-specific (and often more explicit) constraints related to a given translation situation/assignment. The situation-specific constraints may include various technical constraints (e.g. space), special requirements set by the requester of the translation or other parties involved in the situation (e.g. the use of certain terminology), financial constraints, time constraints, etc. As I see it, these constraints are not actual translational norms in a given society, even if they may — and do — reflect norms.5 In each case, the overall effect is produced by the totality of the governing factors as perceived by the translator. What is essential from the point of view of translation is that even though some of the 5

For instance, if a translator is given a 2,000-word essay and instructed by the requester to produce a translation with 1,000 words, the instruction is a situational constraint, not a norm. If, however, the translator prefers not to cut the text because this would constitute a copyright violation, he/she follows a norm according to which the copyright should be respected in translation (and at the same time violates another norm according to which the requester’s word is law to the translator).

65

Cross-cultural News Transmission

factors in a way already “are there” prior to an individual translation assignment, they do not have any fixed a priori weight or “value”. On the contrary, they are assigned a certain weight, or status individually in each translation process in relation to other factors.6 Therefore, for instance, the source text cannot be given a supreme status beforehand, and there can hardly be any universally applicable normative equivalence criteria — whether linguistic, textual or functional — based upon it. The target text, produced by the translator on the basis of his/her analysis and interpretation of the various governing factors, is thus ultimately an image not of the source text but rather of the translator’s perception of the complex totality of factors governing target text production. Naturally, it must be borne in mind that in actual translation situations the translator is always an individual with certain personal characteristics, capacities and skills, a certain state of mind, an individual conception of translation (see Konttinen 1994), etc. Therefore, different individuals’ analyses and interpretations of a particular translation situation and its specific governing factors may vary,7 which may then be reflected as differences in the ensuing translation process and in the resulting translation product.

2.1.1. Situational factors Any translation situation features at least the following set of situational factors having actual or potential significance for the translator’s work (see HolzMänttäri 1984; Vuorinen 1990): Actors. These include the source text producer (the actor who actually writes the source text); the source text source (the actor who forwards the source text to the target actors, and who may have originally commissioned and used the source text); the translation initiator (the actor who initiates the translation process); the translation requester (the actor who actually commissions the translation); the target text user (the actor who uses the target text in his own goal-oriented action); and the target text recipient/audience.8 6

7

8

Naturally, in similar situations certain factors tend to play similar roles. For instance, it may be argued that certain types of source texts with certain functions and cultural positions normally obtain certain statuses as source texts for translation, i.e. they are as a rule treated in a similar way (Vuorinen 1995). It should, however, be borne in mind that this is not necessarily always the case. Similarly, the analyses and interpretations of translation scholars may vary considerably from those of translators (or other scholars). It should be noted that source text producer, source text source, translation initiator, translation requester, translation user, and target text recipient are different actional roles which may be combined in one person but which may also be vested in

66

Erkka Vuorinen

What is important for the translator is knowledge about the objectives, interests, needs, expectations and rights of the various actors, their mutual relationships, their status and role in a particular situation, their position in the overall actional context and so on. In the context of news translation, actors may include correspondents and other individual journalists, news agencies, newspapers or other media institutions, newspaper readers or other media audiences, etc. Source text. The word “text” is used here in a wide sense, also including nonverbal elements such as pictures. There are, in my approach, at least three types of knowledge related to the source text and activated by the translator in a particular translation situation: (1) knowledge about the text as a cultural object, i.e. knowledge about the source text as a cultural object (e.g. its reception and status in the source culture, its history, its genre); (2) subject matter knowledge, i.e. knowledge about the thematic world of the text (what the text is about), in other words knowledge activated for the production of a target text by the translator through his/her analysis of the source text, as well as through additional background research; (3) text production knowledge, i.e. knowledge related to textual form, structure and conventions, as well as textual strategies (which may reflect the text producer’s/source’s goals or ideologies). For instance, in the case of news, text production knowledge means knowledge about how a news story is typically structured (in the source and target cultures), about the stylistic and rhetorical features of news, etc. Transfer medium. This term denotes the medium through which the translated message is to be transferred to recipients and the constraints this places on translation. An example of a transfer medium is a “newspaper” as a physical object with certain characteristic features. These features include the overall format and composition, the space available, the layout, the newspaper as a continuum of cyclically published issues, the illustrations, the relations between items printed in the same issue, the various typographical means, etc. Anticipated setting of target text use and reception. This includes two components: the functional field of the target text, and the characteristics of reception and the reception environment. The notion of a “functional field” surrounding the target text is based on the assumption that in each reception situation, a text relates to a number of other functionally similar texts. Therefore, the target text producer has to estimate what kind of textual field is likely to surround the potential or probable recipient, and how this field is likely to affect his/her reception. In the case of news translation, the immediate functional field of the target text comprises mainly news and other current affairs material published or broadcast previously or simultaneously by the same medium or other media. On the other hand, “the reception itself” often has certain characteristic features that may have to be taken into account in different individuals/institutions.

67

Cross-cultural News Transmission

target text production. A very good example is newspaper reading, which may, first of all, be said to display a special “mode of reception”, characterized by selectivity, randomness and superficiality. Secondly, there are often various concrete situational factors that affect newspaper reading, such as disturbances from the reader’s environment or simultaneous auxiliary activities.

2.1.2. The sociocultural systems involved The various situational factors listed above by no means exist in a vacuum but are embedded in social systems forming a hierarchy (see Shoemaker 1991: 3375). These systems include, first of all, communicating institutions, i.e. institutions or organizations constituting the framework within which translation takes place. In news translation, such an institution or organization may be, for example, a newspaper (as a mass medium and business enterprise) or a news agency. Further, the communicating institution within which translation is carried out is embedded in one or more social subsystems and ultimately in a social and economic system in general. For instance, news institutions may be seen as embedded in a given journalistic system and, further, in a given mass communication system existing in a given society. The different systems may also be viewed as “cultures”. Hence, it could be said that news translation is embedded at least in: (1) the culture of a specific news organization; (2) the journalism culture prevailing in a given society; (3) the mass communication culture prevailing in a given society; and (4) a certain sociocultural setting in general. “Culture” is here understood to be a dynamic totality of knowledge, beliefs, values and models for perception and interpretation, which exists basically in human minds but which may — for reasons of theoretical inquiry — be seen as an abstract superindividual system. Culture is learnt and reproduced by human beings in interaction with the physical world and with other human beings acting according to their cultural models, and it manifests itself more or less directly in human behaviour and action and their results, and as social events and arrangements (see Goodenough 1964: 36; see also Snell-Hornby 1988: 39-40). Accordingly, the notion of “mass communication culture” refers to the totality of knowledge, beliefs, values and models for perception and interpretation pertaining to the field of mass communication in general and manifesting itself, among other things, in the legislation, principles and practices related to the role and functions of mass communication within a society. “Journalism culture” denotes the totality of knowledge, values, etc., which is specific to the field of journalism and finds its manifestations in journalistic work and its products (e.g. news). The culture of an individual news organization has to do with how things are perceived and done within a specific mass communication

68

Erkka Vuorinen

organization, such as a newspaper.

2.1.3. Dimensions of culture-specificity Being embedded in human actions with objectives, interests and needs, and, further, in larger institutional, social and cultural systems, makes the products of communication — in this case, texts — not only situation-specific but also fundamentally culture-bound. As Hans Vermeer (1983: 49) points out, […] jedes Handeln verläuft in einer gegebenen Situation, ist Teil der Situation und verändert sie zugleich. [...] entscheidend für Translation ist, daß das Verhältnis “Situation :: verbalisierter Situationsteil” kulturund damit sprachspezifisch unterschiedlich ist. Damit wird es unmöglich, in der Translation nur den verbalen (sprachlichen) Teil zu berücksichtigen. It is assumed by Vermeer that culture-specificity, as manifested in source texts for translation, may have three basic dimensions9: 1) Culture-specific information — Refers to the factual information expressed in a source text which may be considered unfamiliar, unintelligible, unusual, irrelevant, etc., when looked at from the point of view of the general knowledge of the world assumed to exist in a given (target) culture among a given audience at a given time. Example: When translating an international news item dealing with ethnic violence in Rwanda for the Finnish audience, the following questions, among others, arise: How much has been explained (written/broadcast) earlier about the situation and developments in Rwanda, and how aware can the anticipated audience be expected to be of the situation and developments (“familiarity”)? To what extent can the audience be expected to understand, for instance, the political system of Rwanda (“understandability”)? What information may be considered 9

Discussing intercultural differences, Radegundis Stolze (1993) distinguishes between “reale Inkongruenzen”, which emerge when cultural phenomena (“Realien”) of one culture are unknown in another; “formale Inkongruenzen”, which have to do with different linguistic, or formal, conventions in different cultures; and “semantische Inkongruenzen”, which relate to culture-specific connotations of words that may call forth divergent or undesirable associations if translated wordfor-word, or distort the intended overall meaning of the message. However, Stolze does not pay any attention to the ideological potential of messages.

69

Cross-cultural News Transmission

important to a certain audience at a certain time, and with what degree of precision should it be presented (“relevance”)? What are the aspects that should be emphasized, by, for instance, placing them in the lead (“focus”)? From whose point of view is the situation looked at; who is the observer, who is the agent and who is the affected participant (“perspective”)? 2) Culture-specific ideology — Refers to the values, beliefs, attitudes or interests manifested in a source text which are connected with a certain culture or source and which may be perceived to be undesirable or incompatible with the predominant values, beliefs, attitudes and interests of another culture or subculture. Example: Working on the news item on Rwanda discussed above, the following questions related to ideology could be asked: Does the source text display any explicit or implicit evaluation of the situation in Rwanda, the parties to the ethnic conflict, the country in general, black Africa as a whole (“explicit evaluation”; “implication”)? Whose values or interests do the possible evaluations reflect? What do the possible evaluations look like from the point of view of target mass communication culture, target journalism culture, and the culture of the target news organization? What is told and what is not told in the news item (“selection of information”)? What aspects of the situation are emphasized (“focus”)? From whose point of view is the situation looked at (“perspective”)? 3) Culture-specific manner of presentation — Denotes the formal, structural, stylistic and rhetorical features of a source text that may differ from those commonly known and used for certain communicative purposes in another culture or subculture. Example: Standard questions posed in cases like the one presented above include: Does the structure of the source item correspond to the conventions of news text structure prevalent in the target (sub)culture? Is there any particular reason to deviate from these conventions? Is the source item stylistically and rhetorically compatible with target culture stylistic norms? Is the source item functionally adequate as a text (e.g. textual cohesion, coherence, etc.)? As the above discussion indicates, the three dimensions of culture-specificity are, of course, closely connected. It could even be argued, for instance, that ideology should not or cannot be separated from factual information, because

70

Erkka Vuorinen

there are always certain ideological presuppositions underlying informative statements and their interpretation. From the point of view of a particular culture or subculture these presuppositions are typically self-evident and common-sense facts that are rarely questioned. For instance, in the Western world, the Western news media are often seen as operating on principles of neutrality, objectivity and accuracy, in contrast to other, government-controlled ideological media that specifically make news suit certain political needs (see, e.g., Fenby 1986). Yet, with a slight change in point of view, we reach a different picture. This is aptly shown by Edward Herman in his discussion of “warspeak” used by the U.S. authorities and media during the Gulf war. The concept of “collateral damage” derives from nukespeak, and refers to allegedly unintended killing and destruction arising out of a nuclear attack. It was used in the Gulf war as a complement to “smart bombs” and “surgical strikes,” acknowledging that despite all our precautions and precision some civilians may have been killed and nonmilitary targets destroyed. The difference between us and them is that they intend that their missiles and bombs hit civilian targets. This is terrorism. Our killings of civilians are inadvertent and tragic errors, although with two thousand sorties a day, they might be regrettably frequent. (Herman 1992: 63; see also Lee and Craig 1992) Hence, by making a distinction between factual information and ideology, I do not wish to propose that there is a purely informative content in texts, or that there is a non-ideological position from which texts could be looked at. Instead, I try to account for the fact that, for various reasons, certain features or elements of texts tend to be perceived as politically tendentious or socially, economically or morally suspicious, subversive, or dangerous from the point of view of the recipient (sub)culture, and are therefore consciously or unconsciously manipulated in the translation process.10 On the other hand, there may be other textual features and elements that are typically not perceived to be ideological and which are taken more or less for granted in translation. As such, these features tell us something about the dominant ideology of the recipient (sub)culture as well as that of the translator and translating institution. Identifying this dominant ideology necessarily involves a conscious change in perspective and an effort to transcend the boundaries of 10

For instance, in the recently published Russian version of the Finnish war novel Tuntematon sotilas (“The Unknown Soldier”) by Väinö Linna, several passages including derogatory remarks about Soviet soldiers or references to their morally reprehensible actions or Soviet military losses during the Finno-Soviet Continuation War in 1941-1944 have been left out by the Russian translator (or publisher) (Muravin 1992; see also Robyns 1992; Lefevere 1992).

71

Cross-cultural News Transmission

the normal and the commonsensical in the target (sub)culture’s prevailing cultural models. For, as Naomi Quinn and Dorothy Holland point out, “ideologies must appeal to and activate preexisting cultural understandings, which are themselves compelling” (1991: 13).

2.2. Starting points International news is to a large degree a standardized industrial product, at least as far as news published in similar (elite) media is concerned. Its fundamental similarity in different countries and cultures can mainly be attributed to two closely related factors: the central role of the big Western news agencies and media in international news transmission, and a globally shared implicit system of rules and values — established and diffused by the Western news media — governing news selection and production (van Dijk 1988b: 130). Drawing on his analysis of newspaper stories from more than 70 countries, Teun van Dijk concludes that the universal code of journalistic practices leads to a standardized description of events, provides a stereotypical news schema, and defines the standard formal style for lexical choices and syntactic structures, as well as possible rhetorical devices (ibid.). Regarding the shared system of rules and values, it is clear that international news is originally produced in order to attract and be easily comprehensible to a very large number of subscribers (and their audiences) representing different cultures, ideologies and interests. This means that cultural distances must already be bridged at the initial production stage; in other words, news producers should ideally be able to cover events in terms that can be understood straight away by different audiences, regardless of their prior knowledge of the subject involved (Fenby 1986: 172-173). What makes this particularly interesting is that, on many occasions, there are more than two cultures involved in the process. For instance, there may be a cultural constellation in which an American correspondent/news agency reports on some event or development in Japan, and the news story is then translated and published in a third country, such as Finland. However, as was argued in section 1, it would be an oversimplification to claim that, apart from a linguistic conversion, no changes occur when international news crosses cultural barriers. On the contrary, it seems evident that, despite obvious macrolevel similarities, there are culturally and politically prompted differences in news and news reporting conventions at the microlevel, even within the same cultural sphere. For instance, Kaufmann and Broms (1988) show that news reports on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 were clearly different in Finnish and U.S. (as well as Soviet) newspapers, with Finnish news coverage avoiding explicit ideology and revealing its own

72

Erkka Vuorinen

ideology more through what was not said (see also Kivikuru 1990: 309-328). Hence, we may assume that various culture-related changes will also take place when foreign news material is translated into Finnish, to be used by Finnish media. Further, it may be assumed that these changes pertain equally to the informational, formal and ideological dimensions of news texts.

2.3. Objectives This leads us to the first objective of a study on news translation, as I view it: to identify and describe strategies adopted and norms followed by source text producers and translators of news stories in bridging cultural distances in international news transmission, and to look at the resulting target texts in relation to the existing target system(s). By investigating these questions, the study should shed light on the role and effects of translation in the news production process, and, more specifically, on how translation contributes to Finns’ perception of the surrounding world. The overall goal can be broken down into more detailed questions about the means of producing familiarity and ensuring comprehension of the information content; about the presuppositions of the producers and translators concerning familiarity and comprehensibility among the recipient audiences; about possible shifts in focus and perspective; about explicit and implied evaluation in source and target texts; about structural, stylistic or rhetorical alterations, linguistic interference, etc. More generally, the target text may be looked at in the light of John McNelly’s assumption that news stories tend to become more readable and that a process of “leveling, sharpening and assimilation” takes place as they travel through the international system (1959: 26). McNelly hypothesizes that: The more stages the intermediary communicator is removed from a news event, the less personal concern he feels about it and the more he thinks of it in terms of its “marketability” to editors or readers. (ibid.) In order to account for and understand the cultural transfer of news, it is deemed necessary not simply to look at culture as one monolithic construct, but to try and approach the transfer process through the different cultural levels, or “subcultures”, discussed above in section 2.1. Hence, an effort will have to be made in the study to describe the cultural systems — mass communication culture, journalism culture and the culture of an individual news organization — involved in news translation, and to establish how target texts reflect the norms prevalent in these systems. In particular, Finnish mass communication culture and journalism culture will have to be discussed.

73

Cross-cultural News Transmission

In connection with the previous objectives, the study should also discuss the cultural setup of news translation in Finland in general. This will mean, among other things, determining Finland’s position in the international news system, and looking at the characteristics and relationships of the transnational and national cultures involved. Finally, it is my belief that the study outlined here may provide new angles and insights into the question of “cultural adaptation” as discussed in the field of translation studies. It would appear that cultural adaptation in translation is usually discussed rather narrowly in terms of various principles or techniques that may be employed to explain, explicate or compensate for the culture-bound elements in the original (see e.g. Hervey and Higgins 1992; Stolze 1993). Often, these discussions also have normative undertones; they frequently take the supremacy of the source text for granted and suggest that something must be “sacrificed” or “compromised” in the process of translation, or that the target text must inevitably suffer from “losses”. However, studying translation in a larger actional framework, and looking at cultural transfer from a wider, non-normative perspective including the ideological dimension, could throw new light on the question of cultural adaptation.

2.4. On methodology The empirical part of the study is to be based on a comparison of news items provided in English by international news agencies and their Finnish translations. The approach adopted will be a descriptive one, and will not aim at normative statements concerning the “bad” or “good” qualities of translated news stories. It should be noted, however, that identifying ideological elements in texts inevitably involves certain value judgments, i.e. stating more or less explicitly how the world may be perceived and presented differently. Therefore, it seems that a normative element cannot be avoided altogether, even if the study by no means sets out to investigate international news transmission or the translation of international news into Finnish from the point of view of an elaborated sociopolitical stance or theory.11 To be able to compare the original English news texts submitted for translation in Finland with the resulting target texts, a text analysis method suitable for the purpose will be required. In fact, in addition to the research objectives stated above, the first stage of a research project will have to devise such a method, building on the perception of news translation as gatekeeping 11

Discussing the principles and aims of critical discourse analysis, van Dijk (1993: 252-254) stresses that scholars in the field take — or at least should take — an explicit sociopolitical stance and “spell out their point of view, perspective, principles and aims, both within their discipline and within society at large” (252).

74

Erkka Vuorinen

(see Fujii 1988). This means that various gatekeeping functions, such as message controlling, transforming, supplementing and reorganization, are considered to be part and parcel of the normal textual operations performed in translation to produce a functionally adequate target text for a given use.12 Hence, a comparison of source and target texts will not aim at a detailed clause- or sentence-level comparison of linguistic structures unless these structures can be seen as reflections of the various dimensions and aspects of culture-specificity discussed above.

3. By way of conclusion: a paradigmatic example I will conclude this article by discussing one textual feature that is typical of international news texts and provides an interesting example of what the comparison of source and target news texts could embrace: direct quotes.13 Direct quotes reflect the reported speech character of news. As Bell (1991: 53; see also Fowler 1991: 230) points out, “Much, maybe most, of what journalists report is talk not action: announcements, opinions, reactions, appeals, promises, criticisms”. At the same time, most news — at least international news — is secondhand. In other words, journalists report what other people tell them. According to Bell, news may be viewed as “embedded talk”, meaning that within news texts produced and edited by reporters and editors, there are embedded layers of other texts or speech events (1991: 5055). Reported speech in news stories may be overtly attributed as such or not. Overt attribution may be made through direct or indirect speech,14 the former being characterized by direct quotes allowing more stylistic variation than the rest of the news text. Both direct and indirect speech feature a repertoire of speech verbs and “news performatives” that may, despite the prevailing Western news ideology stressing impartiality, be evaluative and convey the stance of the writer with regard to the statement presented (Bell 1991: 206207).15 12

For a recent detailed account of the notion of gatekeeping, see Shoemaker (1991). Since the 1920s several analyses of direct and reported speech have been undertaken. It is not my intention to cover this field now. I merely want to stress the possible relevance of the topic in the context of news translation. 14 Speech presentation can be formally divided into five categories: direct speech, free direct speech, indirect speech, free indirect speech, and narrative report of speech act (see Short 1988). 15 Short (1988: 76) provides an example of the evaluative choice of speech verbs quoting two related headlines from The Daily Mirror: “Police hit me on the head” claims Scargill; “He fell, we were nowhere near him” say the police (Short’s emphasis). 13

75

Cross-cultural News Transmission

Direct quotes may, then, be viewed as a primarily stylistic feature related to the reported speech character of news. They may also be seen as a rhetorical device contributing to the credibility of news (van Dijk 1988a: 8394). The rhetoric of news discourse is, perhaps more than anything else, “rhetoric of credibility” (see Luostarinen 1990: 116). In other words, it is of fundamental importance for news to convince its recipients of the plausibility, truthfulness and accuracy of what is being said. One of the strategies employed by news reporters to accomplish this is the use of direct quotes from sources, especially when opinions are involved. Direct quotes suggest greater truthfulness and reliability than event description by the reporter, because they are true as verbal acts (van Dijk 1988a: 87). According to Short (1988: 67), through using direct quotes a reporter lays claim to represent faithfully (a) the illocutionary force, (b) the propositional content and (c) the words and structures used by the original speaker. A related strategy is that of quoting opinions from different sources and ideologies, which creates an impression of objectivity and thereby emphasizes truthfulness (van Dijk 1988a: 85). In addition to stressing truthfulness and reliability, quotations make a news report livelier, more human, more colourful and more dramatic. Moreover, they protect the reporters (and the news organization) by allowing them to distance themselves from the story and disown what is said in the quote (see Tuchman 1978: 95-97; Bell 1991: 208). The use of direct quotes can also be seen as part of the overall strategy of journalists apparently to stick to “hard facts” and refrain from personal value judgements. By presenting evaluative statements in quotes and attributing them to sources, news producers are able to maintain their image as neutral, non-interfering recorders and mediators. Despite their apparent truthfulness and distance from the news text producer, direct quotes have, of course, a great deal of ideological potential. They may be chosen and reproduced to suggest certain preferred interpretations or to lend support to certain viewpoints. They may be used out of their original situational and discursive contexts. The speech verbs used in conjunction with them may be chosen to support, question or even ridicule the actual statement. Quotes from different sources may be organized “dramaturgically” in a way that creates — possibly false — impressions of actual dialogic relations between the sources, be their views consonant or conflicting (see Palmolahti 1993: 127), and so on. Hence, direct quotes provide an interesting case for the comparison of international news texts and their translations. For instance, the comparison could address the following questions: - How are direct quotes dealt with in the translation process? To what extent are direct quotes in the original reproduced in the target text? Are the reproductions (propositionally) full or partial? Are there stylistic

76

Erkka Vuorinen

differences? To what extent does conversion of direct quotes into indirect speech occur? Do conversions display any typical features or regularities? - What happens to attributions in the translation process? To what extent are the original attributions reproduced fully/partially in the target text? To what extent are they deleted altogether? If changes in attribution occur, do they display any typical features or regularities? - How are speech verbs treated in the translation process? Do translations imitate the original speech verbs? If changes are made, do they show any typical features or regularities? - Do target texts display reorganization of original quotes? If reorganizations occur, do they result in new source constellations or suggest or give rise to new interpretations? - Do any changes in the treatment of direct quotes (including attributions and speech verbs) result in changes in style, tone, etc., at the textual level? If the analysis of a corpus of news texts and their translations, the size of which has not yet been definitely decided, reveals regular patterns in the treatment of direct quotes (or any other textual features related to the dimensions of culturespecificity), it may be possible to identify certain culture-specific norms and strategies followed by Finnish news translators working in their particular organizational, institutional and sociocultural environments. An interesting question then can be how these norms and strategies reflect the norms, values and practices of the sociocultural systems in which news translation is embedded, or, on the other hand, how they contribute to reproducing or changing these systems.

References Abu-Ssaydeh, A.F. 1991 “The Western News Media and the Language of International Political News Items in the Arabic Press: Implications of Interaction”, Translatio. Nouvelles de la FIT/FIT Newsletter X:4, pp.425-445. Bell, Allan 1984

1991

“Good Copy — Bad News: the Syntax and Semantics of News Editing”, in Peter Trudgill (Ed.), Applied Sociolinguistics, London: Academic Press, pp.73-116. The Language of News Media, Oxford: Blackwell.

77

Cross-cultural News Transmission

Boyd-Barrett, Oliver 1980 The International News Agencies, London: Constable. Byarugaba, Boniface 1990 “The Tanzania Journalist: The Unrecognized Translator”, Translatio. Nouvelles de la FIT/FIT Newsletter IX:1-2, pp.92100. Delabastita, Dirk 1989 “Translation and Mass-Communication: Film and TV Translation as Evidence of Cultural Dynamics”, Babel 35:4, pp.193-218. Fenby, Jonathan 1986 The International News Services, New York: Schocken Books. Fowler, Roger 1991 Language in the News. Discourse and Ideology in the Press, London / New York: Routledge. Fujii, Akio 1988

“News Translation in Japan”, Meta 33:1, pp.32-37.

Goodenough, Ward E. 1964 “Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics”, in Dell Hymes (Ed.), Language in Culture and Society. A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology, New York / Evanston / London: Harper & Row, pp.36-39. Herman, Edward S. 1992 Beyond Hypocrisy. Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda, Boston: South End Press. Hermans, Theo 1991 “Translational Norms and Correct Translations”, in Kitty van Leuven-Zwart and Ton Naaijkens (Eds.), Translation Studies. The State of the Art, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp.155-169. Hervey, Sandor and Ian Higgins 1992 Thinking Translation. A Course in Translation Method: French to English, London / New York: Routledge.

78

Erkka Vuorinen

Holz-Mänttäri, Justa 1984 Translatorisches Handeln. Theorie und Methode, Helsinki: Suomalaisen tiedeakatemian toimituksia (B 226). Kaufmann, Rebecca and Henri Broms 1988 “A Semiotic Analysis of the Newspaper Coverage of Chernobyl in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Finland”, Semiotica 70:1-2, pp.27-48. Kivikuru, Ullamaija 1986 Angloamerikkalaisuus ja Suomen tiedonvälitys. Riippuvuuden muotojen ja sisällön tarkastelua, Helsinki: Oy Yleisradio Ab, Suunnittelu-ja tutkimusosasto. 1990 Tinned Novelties or Creative Culture? A Study on the Role of Mass Communication in Peripheral Nations, Helsinki: University of Helsinki, Department of Communication Publications (1F/10/90). Konttinen, Kalle 1994 “Kääntämiskäsitykset teorian ja käytäntöjen diskursseissa”, unpublished seminar paper, Turku: University of Turku, Department of Translation Studies. Kukkonen, Tiina 1989 Translatorinen ja journalistinen toiminta Suomen Tietotoimiston ulkomaantoimituksessa, unpublished MA thesis, Tampere: University of Tampere, Department of Translation Studies. Lee, Junghi.; Robert L. Craig 1992 “News as an Ideological Framework: Comparing US Newspapers’ Coverage of Labor Strikes in South Korea and Poland”, Discourse & Society 3:3, pp.341-363. Lefevere, André 1992 Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, London / New York: Routledge. Leino, Elina and Sari Rantala 1989 Kääntäjä uutispöydän takana. Sanomalehtikääntämisen erityispiirteitä, unpublished MA thesis, Tampere: University of Tampere, Department of Translation Studies.

79

Cross-cultural News Transmission

Luostarinen, Heikki 1990 “Journalismikritiikin etenemissuuntia”, in Taisto Hujanen and Heikki Luostarinen (Eds.), Avauksia journalismikritiikkiin, Tampere: University of Tampere, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication Publications (Ser. C, 12/1990, pp.112128). McNelly, John T. 1959 “Intermediary Communicators in the International Flow of News”, Journalism Quarterly 36, pp.23-26. Mossop, Brian 1990 “Translating Institutions and ‘Idiomatic’ Translation”, Meta XXXV:2, pp.342-355. Muravin, Gennady 1992 “Tuntematon sotilas ilmestyi venäjäksi — mutta siistittynä ja sensuroituna”, Helsingin Sanomat (10 April). Offor, Marja-Riitta 1993 Kulttuurispesifinen adaptaatio uutissähkeiden kääntämisessä, unpublished MA thesis, Turku: University of Turku, Department of Translation Studies. Palmolahti, Harri 1993 Kuka ampui? Tutkimus journalismin, erityisesti televisiouutisten, tavasta syyllistää, Tampere: University of Tampere, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication Publications (Ser. A, 81/1993). Quinn, Naomi and Dorothy Holland 1991 “Culture and Cognition”, in Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn (Eds.), Cultural Models in Language and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robyns, Clem 1992 “Towards a Sociosemiotics of Translation”, Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 16, pp.211-226. Röyskö, Hannele 1994 “Käännösohjelma nopeuttaa ison tekstimäärän kääntämistä. Parhaat tulokset rajatuista aihepiireistä”, Kauppalehti (8

80

Erkka Vuorinen

September), p.43. Shoemaker, Pamela J. 1991 Gatekeeping, Newbury Park: Sage. Short, Michael 1988 “Speech Presentation, the Novel and the Press”, in Willie Van Peer (Ed.), The Taming of the Text. London / New York: Routledge, pp.61-81. Snell-Hornby, Mary 1988 Translation Studies. An Integrated Approach, Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stolze, Radegundis 1993 “Mitteilen und Erklären”, in Justa Holz-Mänttäri and Christiane Nord (Eds.), Traducere Navem. Festschrift für Katharina Reiß zum 70. Geburtstag, Tampere: Studia Translatologica (Ser. A, Vol.3), pp.261-274. Toury, Gideon 1980 In Search of a Theory of Translation, Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. Tuchman, Gaye 1978 Making News. A Study in the Construction of Reality, New York/ London: The Free Press. Van Dijk, Teun A. 1988a News as Discourse, Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1988b News Analysis. Case Studies of International and National News in the Press, Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1993 “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis”, Discourse & Society 4:2, pp.249-283. Vehmas-Lehto, Inkeri 1989 Quasi-Correctness. A Critical Study of Finnish Translations of Russian Journalistic Texts, Helsinki: Neuvostoliittoinstituutin vuosikirja (31). Vermeer, Hans J. 1983 Aufsätze zur Translationstheorie, Heidelberg: private publishing.

81

Cross-cultural News Transmission

Vuorinen, Erkka 1990 Kääntämistyön ohjautumisesta sanomalehden toimitusprosessissa — esimerkkitapauksena Turun Sanomat, unpublished MA thesis, Turku: University of Turku, Department of Translation Studies. 1995 “Source Text Status and (News) Translation”, in Riitta Oittinen and Jukka-Pekka Varonen (Eds.), Aspectus Varii Translationis, Tampere: Studia Translatologica (Ser. B, Vol.1), pp.89-92.

82

Suggest Documents