Teaching Translation of Journalistic Texts as LSP Translation: evaluating and promoting creativity in a complex adaptation process

Journalistic translation research (JTR) is a fairly young research discipline. It emerged mostly in the 1990s, and more contributions from 2000 onwards installed JTR as a dedicated field of study, as attested by chapters in The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies (2013) and Handbook of Translation Studies (2010 and 2012), a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication devoted to the topic (Bassnett 2005), the publication of Translation in Global News in 2009 (Bielsa and Bassnett), and important contributions by reputed translation scholars such as Gambier (2010) and Schäffner (2005, 2012a, 2012b). At the dawn of JTR Stetting (1989) introduced the term transediting for the process of translation in the news, which involves a complex combination of translating, journalistic writing and editing for the socio-cultural target group. This process is usually carried out by journalists who are mostly not professional translators, and for whom the more strictly defined trade of interlingual translation is a second-rate aspect of a much more comprehensive and complex journalistic process (cf. Van Doorslaer’s 2012 term journalators, and cf. Gambier 2010, Valdeon 2010). The process of journalistic interlingual translation and the immediate context in which this is carried out has become the subject of some extensive studies in the last five years, following Bielsa and Bassnett’s (2009) discussion of ethnographic approaches to translation practices in major news agencies. These include Davier’s work (2012, 2014) on the role and visibility of translation in the Swiss headquarters of AFP and the Swiss agency ATS, as well as the study of the journalistic translation process on a micro-level using techniques such as keystroke logging and eye tracking by Perrin and Ehrensberger-Dow (2013). The current paper, however, focusses on the translation products resulting from a non-professional didactic context. Thus, with this paper we aim to gain some insight into the techniques and skills to be acquired by students, and investigate (ways to promote and measure) their creativity in the process of journalistic written adaptation or localization. The preliminary investigation is based on 60 Ba3 students’ translations from English into Dutch of opinion columns and longer articles written by specialists on the topics of Muslim attacks in Europe, devolution and science. The required interdisciplinary skills are related to both translation and writing, but also – it has been argued by Bassnett (2005) - to interpreting. The criteria which are included for the assessment of the translated articles are situated on the textual level (cf. editing and the organization of textual content), and relate further also to perspective and repositioning of readership. Creativity is gauged with reference to the students’ transadaptation of metaphors and culture specific references (including popular culture), use of explicitation / rephrasing or deletion, word choice (including Anglicisms), the translation of multi-hyphenated ad hoc formations (e.g. a publish-and-be-damned devil-may-care attitude), syntax (cf. syntactic borrowing), and transadaptation of headlines. It is argued in this paper that adaptation to the intended function of the journalistic article in the new socio-cultural target setting can only be effected if the journalistic translator or transeditor balances a creative writer’s choices with both a translator’s and an interpreter’s rendering of a source text’s intended function. Keywords: Specialized translation – translation didactics – transediting / adaptation / localization – journalistic texts – creativity.

ISBN:978-88-548-9290-3

Publication year:2016