ABSTRACT
This chapter will substantiate the view introduced in Chapter 3 that news agencies can be viewed as vast translation agencies, structurally designed to achieve fast and reliable translations of large amounts of information. It will maintain that translation is of the utmost importance in the news agencies and that it is inseparable from other journalistic practices that intervene in the production of news. Rejecting the naive view that translations are often improvised by people who do not have the necessary training, this chapter will show that the news editor has the specific skills required for the elaboration of such translations, and that the organization of the news agency has been conceived in order to facilitate communication flows between different linguistic communities so as to reach global publics with maximum speed and efficiency. We saw in the last chapter how news agencies specialized, since their
inception, in the provision of international news, initially to domestic markets and later, through alliances with other news organizations worldwide, on a global scale. This implied dealing with a diversity of languages and with translation from the very start. It is not a coincidence that these organizations were created by cosmopolitan, multilingual businessmen: Charles Havas had lived and conducted business in Lisbon, while Paul Julius Reuter was a German who obtained his initial experience of news agency journalism in France before settling in Britain. In fact, as we have seen, before it was transformed into the first news agency in 1835, Agence Havas was a translation agency known as Bureau Havas (1832-35), which provided the French media and business community with translations from the international press. Bureau Havas centralized news translations leaving many freelancers out of work and is the first expression of the growing need for international news from around the world. In the first decades after their inception, news agencies already offered news services in different languages directed at the main Western news markets, and developed global networks which efficiently dealt with linguistic diversity. Agency journalists who pioneered in the expansion of their worldwide networks, managing offices in
new regions and serving as agents in the furthest corners of the world, were, very much like the founders themselves, also characterized by their cosmopolitan formation and multilingual skills.1
