When George Orwell worked for the BBC Eastern Services during the Second World War, he regarded it as 'an organ of colonial discourse propagating the word and world view of the metropolitan centre to its peripheral subject people' (Kerr, 2002: 473-90). Orwell's misgivings about his own journalistic practice and the BBC Eastern Service's suspected ideological functions may pose an enduring dilemma for some journalists, but many are delighted to endure the processes of recruitment, induction, training and enculturation into the BBC's hegemonic, globally diffused brand of impartial journalism. This is called, with some self-irony, 'being BBCed' by journalists working in, or for, Bush House. The BBC's overseas services (now the World Service) have long relied on an army of diasporic translators and 'the right kind of voice' to disseminate news across the globe. The long-standing reputation of the BBC World Service (BBCWS) among the world's pre-eminent broadcasters and its credibility have depended on the largely undocumented and unexplored everyday transcultural encounters and translation practices that have taken place in the diasporic and cosmopolitan contact zones of Bush House. This special issue draws on a collaborative empirical research project on the BBC World Service to examine wider issues of the politics, ethics and practices of transcultural journalism and the politics of translation. 1 Media Studies has been quite slow to wake up to issues of translation although there are some notable recent exceptions (Ang and Hawkins, 2008). It could be argued that all Journalism 12(2) 135-142
Instead of treating kinship as a system subject to ethnic closure, the article explores how the figure of the 'cousin' has come to function as a 'cultural unit' (Schneider 1980a) in a polyethnic and consciously multi-cultural setting. The setting, London's post-migration suburb of Southall, shows young Sikh, Hindu and Muslim South Asians, as well as Afro-Caribbeans and to some extent 'whites', converging upon an emphasis on cousin bonds and cousin claims. This convergence is understood as an internally plural process which, although subject to hegemonic influences, relies upon a variety of 'community'-specific and mutually independent post-migration agenda and thus cannot be reduced to direct dyadic exchanges. Exploring the significance of the cousin as a local multi-'cultural unit', the argument draws both on Schneider's idea of the 'two orders' and on the structural articulation of cousin claims with claims to cross-'community' loyalties. Ethnographic attention to processes of convergence may help studies of kinship to overcome the limitations of regarding ethnic delineations as boundaries of culture.
As the World Service’s first foray into foreign-language broadcasting (Guardian, 1938) and its first initiative to branch out into non-English-language television (1994—96; 2008 to present), BBC Arabic has played a central role for the Corporation. Distrust of its claims to impartiality, however, persists. To assess both claims and critiques, we examine its politics of translation under four headings: transporting data from the field to the broadcaster; translating from one language into another; transposing data and message by inflexions of tone; and transmitting the result to selected audiences at selected times. We do so from both an etic (‘outsiders’) analysis of BBC output and an emic (‘insiders’) analysis of what audiences perceive and react to by way of critical receptions and reactions.
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