Dr Elisabeth Möckli, Nottingham Trent University (UK)

The Silence of the Archives:

On the issue of researching news translation in historical contexts and using newspapers as historical sources

In times of ideological polarisation and political tensions, the mass media are pivotal in providing comprehensible information about complex conflicts to the public. In turn, politicians consider the mass media as a mirror of different facets of public opinion.  However, newspapers are not only contemporary sources of information, but are drawn on by historians as primary sources to reconstruct past realities. Most contemporary readers and scholarly users of newspapers are unaware of the role translation plays in the production of international news. While recent research in Translation Studies has highlighted the impact translation can have on the representation of politics and subsequent discourses, little is known as of yet about news translation in historical contexts such as the Third Reich.

The brave researcher who attempts to explore historical news translation from a sociological angle, i.e. in terms of actors and professional practices, will soon run into considerable difficulties: In a vast majority of cases, news translators were journalists and did neither consider themselves to be translators nor to conduct translational activities. Consequently, the researcher is met with silence when she interrogates the archives in translational terms. This paper engages with methodological issues in translation history by posing two questions: (1) How do we need to formulate questions about historical news translation in order to obtain a response from the archives? (2) What implications does research in historical news translation have for scholars using (historical) newspapers?

Based on a case study of the Manchester Guardian archive, the paper will address the first question by arguing that we can only efficiently interrogate archives if we understand our object of study not as a traditional form of translation but as an entity of closely intertwined journalistic and translational practices. To substantiate this claim, the paper will first explore the nature of news translation, then outline possible questions, and finally present practical results of this type of interrogation from the case study. The paper will then explore the second issue by comparing current practices of historians who rely on newspapers as historical sources with findings from the still scarce Translation Studies research into historical news translation. The paper will argue that while Translation Studies can benefit from the expertise of historians in using archives, historians might be well advised to consult research into historical news translation to achieve a more valid evaluation of newspapers as historical sources.

While the research presented offers some valuable insights into the methodological issues explored by the current conference, further research will be needed to corroborate these suggestions which are derived from an individual case study. In light of this, the proposed article might initially be best conceived of as a position paper until an expansion of data/case studies will shed further light on this line of inquiry.

References:

Anon. History of the Guardian: A brief History of the Guardian Newspaper, available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/gnm-archive/2002/jun/06/1 (last accessed 25/08/2013), 2002.

Ayerst, David. Guardian – Biography of a Newspaper. London: Collins, 1971.

Bassnett, Susanne, and Esperança Bielsa. Translation in Global News. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.

Bassnett, Susan, and & Christina Schäffner, eds.  Political Discourse, Media and Translation, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.

Bielsa Mialet, Esperança “The Sociology of News Translation: Outline of an Emerging Field”, MonTI (2), 2010. 154-172.

Brook, Jonathan. The Role of Translation in the Production of International Print News. Three Case Studies in the Language Direction Spanish to English, Unpublished Thesis, School of European Languages and Literatures, Auckland, 2012.

Brownlie, Shiobhan. “Representing News from France”. Political Discourse, Media and Translation. Eds. Christina Schäffner and Susan Bassnett. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 32-54.

Conway, Kyle “Vargagries of News Translation on Canadian Braodcasting Corporation Television: Traces of History”, Meta 59(3), 2014. 620-635.

Susanne Janssen, Giselinde Kuipers and Marc Verboord “Cultural Globalization and Arts Journalism: The International Orientation of Arts and Culture Coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. Newspapers, 1955 to 2005”, American Sociological Review (73) 2008. 719-740.

O’Sullivan, Carol “Introduction: Rethinking Methods in Translation History”, Translation Studies 5(2), 2012. 131-138.

van Doorslaer Luc “The Double Extension of Translation in the Journalistic Field”, Across Languages and Cultures 11(2), 2010. 175–188.

van Doorslaer Luc “How Language and (Non-) Translation Impact on Media Newsrooms: The Case of Newspapers in Belgium”, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 17(2), 2009. 83–92.

Biographical Note:

Elisabeth Möckli is a lecturer in German at Nottingham Trent University and obtained her PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Edinburgh (2014). She occasionally works as a freelance translator and a translation assessor. Her PhD thesis compared the French and British media representations of Goebbels’ speeches and the role translation played in their construction. Her current research interest lies with the role of translation in shaping political discourse and thus humanitarian action in the context of the Kindertransporte to Switzerland during the Second World War.