The invisibility of translation in newsrooms : The case of Belgian newspapers

Contemporary journalism is characterized by a growing convergence of traditional and new media, by a focus on both global and local news topics and a changing organizational context. Internationalization and globalization necessarily imply a huge and ever growing amount of implicit and explicit translation acts. Particularly in newsrooms, a stream of international news is received, processed, translated and rewritten at a high speed. Nevertheless, the frequent, almost permanent translation activity is not problematized. In most cases, newsrooms function without translators, journalists are supposed to include the translation activity in their journalistic processing. This reality is strongly opposed to the findings of research in translation studies, that has shown in the last decades how complex translation can be. Despite the clear evidence of cultural, stylistic and rhetorical influence and manipulation in translation, this complexity is generally reduced in newsrooms to a non existing, linguistic simplicity: the idea or illusion that languages interrelate on a one-to-one basis. It is paradoxical that the massively changed conditions of internationalization in newsrooms coexist with a relatively unchanged attitude towards the consequences of translated expression. A case study on the implicit and explicit translation practices in the newsrooms of Belgian newspapers will illustrate the determining role of translation and the use of selected sources. In a first stage, a corpus with articles from the world news pages will be analysed in both Dutch speaking and French speaking Belgian newspapers, focusing on the sources (linguistic aspects of news agencies), the languages and the topics. A second part exists of in-depth interviews with journalists and editors in chief who are confronted with the findings. In the Belgian sociolinguistic context, the journalistic differences in production and reception of world news become even more problematized because of the different news traditions in the Dutch speaking and French speaking part of the country.status: publishe