Interdisciplinarity in Researching the Translation of Global News

Description

This workshop will start with a reflection on the complexity of the study of news translation as a phenomenon that cuts across traditional academic fields, which calls for interdisciplinarity. It will then discuss current approaches to news translation, with a focus on the potential advantages and dangers of interdisciplinarity and paying special attention to the difficulties that are most likely to affect translation studies scholars. The first part of the session will also illustrate the scope for interdisciplinary research on news translation at the point of intersection between translation studies and journalism studies by presenting an exploratory account of the notion of domestication of the foreign. The concept of domestication is used in both translation studies and journalism research, although in very different ways. In both cases, it can serve to draw attention to the way in which news events are globalised and to the significance of different strategies for doing so. It also challenges simplistic views about news homogenisation in the context of globalisation by leading to abundant empirical evidence of how global news events are told in diverging ways at the local level.

The second part of the session will focus on ways in which such complexities in news translation may be analysed by utilising concepts and methods from different disciplinary strands. By drawing on methods from discourse studies and using the concepts of voice, reflexivity and framing, we will consider how the use of distinct strategies in news translation may have significant consequences on the ways in which an event is portrayed or the difference of the other is presented in the news. Such divergences can also be analysed by drawing on social narrative theory and the comprehensive and rigorous conceptual frameworks of contemporary narratology. The workshop demonstrates how with even just four basic elements – narrators, actors, time and space – researchers can begin a close textual analysis of news as narratives that circulate in various competing and contested forms, constructing diverse realities for consumers.

Period	13 Oct 2017
Event title	Researching Translation & Interpreting I: The Challenge and Promise of Interdisciplinarity
Event type	Conference
Location	Shanghai, ChinaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International