Investigating ideology in news features translated for two Italian media

Abstract

The paper focuses on the news backgrounder, a sub-genre which has until now received less attention in translation studies. It is a major site of the journalist’s voice and is thus deemed a fertile field for the exploration of subjectivity and ideology in translation. The paper, dealing with the language pair English–Italian, stems from an emblematic context which led to two case studies allowing for interesting comparisons. The weekly news magazine Internazionale, counting on the collaboration of freelance professional translators and the news website Italiadallestero, supported by volunteer collaboration, are the focus of attention. The two cases share the same interest, i.e., how Italy and Italians are seen through the eyes of the foreign press and both fundamentally rely on translation. Issues of subjectivity and ideology are invariably entailed and conveyed through evaluative language choices. In order to examine their meaning and effects, the paper makes use of an approach that combines a product- and a context-oriented methodology, the former grounded on a text-focused qualitative analysis within the framework of Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005), the latter based on interviews with (some of) the agents who were actually involved in the translation process.

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“…Furthermore, they situate their perspective on triangulation within a broader epistemological framework. Although this special issue centers around the discussion on methodological approaches to news translation with an emphasis on triangulation, various authors employ triangulation as a synonym of combination and/or mixed methods, thus contributing to the ambiguity of the term (see Davier, Schäffner, and Van Doorslaer, 2018;Manfredi, 2018). Triangulation thus means different things to different researchers.…”

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“…In addition, Munday compared the translations of Donald Trump's speech to the translations of President Obama's inauguration speech. Appraisal theory (and notably the notions of Judgement and Appreciation) is also at the base of a study by Manfredi (2018), who carried out a textual analysis of the ideological elements in the Italian versions of foreign news texts. For her study, Manfredi combined textual analysis with interviews with the news writers in order to corroborate her findings.…”

“…A mixed methodology is also suggested by Manfredi (2018) and van Rooyen (2018). Manfredi combined interviews with some of the individuals responsible for the translations that appeared in Internazionale and Italiadallestero with the use of Appraisal theory in order to explore the ways in which Italians are portrayed in foreign media, and then translated for Italian audiences.…”

“…Indeed, suggest triangulating textual analysis with interviews with journalists in order to gain a deeper insight of the translation practices involved in news production. Examples of this are the publications by Davier (2017), Gendron et al (2019), Haapanen and Perrin (2019), Roumanos and Noblet (2019), Matsushita (2019a), Rasul (2019), Hong (2019) and Manfredi (2018), which combined ethnographic approaches with content or textual analysis. For her part, van Rooyen's mixed method approach drew on Actor-Network theory and interviews with reporters (2019).…”

Translating in fits and starts: pause thresholds and roles in the research of translation processes

“…Indeed, Davier and van Doorslaer (2018) suggest triangulating textual analysis with interviews with journalists in order to gain a deeper insight of the translation practices involved in news production. Examples of this are the publications by Davier (2017), Gendron et al (2019), Haapanen and Perrin (2019), Roumanos and Noblet (2019), Matsushita (2019a), Rasul (2019), Hong (2019) and Manfredi (2018), which combined ethnographic approaches with content or textual analysis. For her part, van Rooyen's mixed method approach drew on Actor-Network theory and interviews with reporters (2019).…”