Science News and/in Translation

For most of us, the news media are our primary source of science- and health-related information. However, scientific knowledge undergoes various transformations in the course of travelling from the lab to the media to the news consumer, some of which may significantly distort the accuracy of the message. The overall goals of this PhD project are (1) to better understand how science news comes into being and circulates in and via today’s global mediascape and (2) to study the role of translation and the translator/journalist in these processes. This knowledge is all the more important in an era marked by an overabundance of news stories, some more accurate than others, on the coronavirus. This PhD project, which is part of a larger project on ‘The Circulation of Science News in the Coronavirus Era’, envisions 1) a big-picture analysis of contemporary translation practices in the Flemish science news ecosystem, and 2) an extensive case study zeroing in on (translated) news coverage about the search for a coronavirus vaccine. It is the first study to situate Flanders in the global media landscape in which science news circulates today.