Translating news discourse on the Crimean conflict: where CDA and Translation Studies meet

This paper combines Translation Studies and Critical Discourse Studies to analyze the coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation in Crimea in “Western” and Russian media. It is our aim to underscore the fundamental and sometimes problematic role of news discourse in political conflicts, where it shapes perceptions, creates identities and influences attitudes (see also van Dijk 1988). In particular, our study illustrates the impact of translation, as a form of intercultural communication, on the news production process. Translation, in today’s globalized world, is not only an act of intercultural communication but an integral part of political discourse. Information is made available (or not) and that particular interpretations of reality are promoted or contested on an international level. We consider translation as a discursive practice in its own right, “socially constitutive as well as socially shaped” (Faiclough and Wodak 1997, 258), or, as translation scholars have formulated it, never “neutral” and “transparent” but “untidy and partial” (Hermans 2002, 11; Ieţcu-Fairclough 2008; Tymoczko 2007, xviii). Instead of being just a form of “relayed communication”, it appears as the par excellence arena to reconfigure and “reframe” existing discourse through more or less subtle shifts (Baker 2006; Goffman 1974; Schäffner 2004). Our analysis will focus on the popular Russian website InoSMI (ИноСМИ), a media project affiliated with RIA Novosti news agency that monitors and translates foreign press into Russian. We will explore how cultural understandings of the Russian identity are created, reinforced or contested in Western media discourse on Crimea, and how they are reframed on InoSMI through selective appropriation, shifts in translation and visual strategies, thus highlighting the potential richness of a multimodal corpus