Reporting quotable yet untranslatable speech

Abstract

When a newsmaker (i.e., a newsworthy subject) is speaking or being spoken about in a foreign language, quoting requires translation. In such “translingual quoting” (Haapanen, 2017), it is not only the content of the speech but also its translatability that determines newsworthiness. While news media in some countries prefer indirect quotation, Japanese media favor direct quotes (Matsushita, 2019). This practice yields relatively clear source text (ST)-target text (TT) relationships in translingual quoting, especially when a political speech is directly quoted by newspapers, offering abundant data for news translation research (Matsushita, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2019). However, this research approach has been challenged by the rise of a public figure known for making headlines with his extemporaneous remarks: US President Donald J. Trump. Translingual quoting of Trump in the non-English media has proven at times a “nearly impossible quest” (Lichfield, 2016) because of the unique features of his utterances, such as unorthodox word choices, run-on sentences and disjointed syntax (Viennot, 2016). This difficulty is heightened for Japanese newspapers, which uphold a longstanding journalistic standard of reporting speech as faithfully as possible, even in the case of translingual quoting (Matsushita, 2019). Against this backdrop, this article examines the often-conflicting relationship between “quotability” and “translatability” by analyzing how Japanese newspaper articles have quoted Donald Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, through comparison of original speeches and news texts produced by Japanese newspapers. The comparison shows that institutional conventions of Japanese newspaper companies regarding direct quotes are frequently neglected by the journalists trans-quoting Trump (e.g., changed to indirect quotes or reproduced less faithfully), leading to marked differences in the textual portrayals of the newsmakers in terms of eloquence and assertiveness.

Quoting Chinese Political Discourse through Translation: An Analysis of Xi Jinping’s Climate Change Discourse in English-language News Media

“…Using various quotations as examples, Chen (2009) investigates how the ideologies of certain newspapers have shaped transedited news articles. Furthermore, studies have analyzed how political figures' speeches are quoted and translated into another language in news media e.g., Schäffner (2008) on Vladimir Putin's in the English news; Scammell (2018) on Nicolas Sarkozy's in the British press; and Matsushita (2020) on Barack Obama's and Donald Trump's in the Japanese press. As Schäffner (2012, p. 115) indicates, "the way direct and reported speech is combined can also contribute to the positioning and construction of the political actors".…”

News translation and national image in the time of Covid-19

“…Research findings on the involvement of professional translators in the newsroom are not encouraging. With the exceptions of those magazines explicitly relying on translation (such as the Italian Internazionale), newswires do not generally employ translators (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009: 57;Davier 2015), and this trend emerges even in non-European settings: professional news translators are virtually non-existent in Japanese newsrooms as well (Matsushita 2020).…”

Towards alternatives to mechanistic models of translation in contemporary journalism

“…In contrast to the fluent, idiomatic, 'domesticating' renderings that, as explained in the previous section, have been described as the dominant trait or expectation in relation to translation occurring in the newsrooms, a tendency towards more literal wording has been identified (Bielsa & Bassnett, 2009, p. 88;Davier & van Doorslaer, 2018, pp. 247, 251) when precision in relation to the source text emerges as an important value, for instance in the translation of quotations (Haapanen & Perrin, 2019;Matsushita, 2020). Van Poucke and Belikova (2016) also identify instances of foreignisation in their study of the Russian translations published on the news website InoSMI.…”