ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the central position of translation in international news production and rewriting processes. This role is already important when limiting translation to its traditional and narrow interlingual variant, so called ‘translation proper’. However, it becomes even more dominant when translation is considered in its broader definition, including intralingual translation as well, in accordance with disciplinary developments in translation studies over the past decades. Surely, rewriting, localizing, recontextualizing, and re-creation are ubiquitous daily practices in international news production. From this perspective, journalistic authoring and translating are much more overlapping practices than generally acknowledged. In research, this similarity and merger of functions is expressed via the use of composite terms such as ‘transediting’ or ‘journalator’. Attempts for achieving more interdisciplinary exchanges with – most of all– journalism and communication studies is a result of these new insights in translation studies. The recent attention on participant- and process-oriented approaches in news translation research serves as a promising basis for introducing further variations in a field that has, till now, been predominantly product-oriented. A more pronounced focus on institutional actors and their networks can shed new light on the relationship between news flows and translation flows in globalized media.