On the use of the term ‘translation’ in journalism studies

Abstract

Starting from the consolidation of journalistic translation as a subarea of research within translation studies and the calls for interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis of news texts, this article interrogates the lack of interaction between translation and journalism studies by examining the use of the term ‘translation’ in the latter. After providing the definition in two general dictionaries and in translation studies reference works, the article explores how ‘translation’ is used in a corpus of 186 articles written by journalism studies scholars. The results show that these researchers use ‘translation’ to refer to linguistic transfer as well as to other more general transformations. The study also demonstrates that ‘transediting’, widely used in journalistic translation research, does not appear in the publications by journalism studies scholars.