[Events] Jiao Tong Baker Centre 2018 Seminar Series 2: Prof. Roberto A. Valdeón on Journalistic Translation Research

Journalistic Translation Research

Guest Speaker: Prof. Roberto A. Valdeón, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain
Time: November 6-7, 2018
Venue: Room 218 (November 6); Room 212 (November 7)

Titles and abstracts

1. An Introduction to Journalistic Translation Research

6 November 2018, 5.00 – 6.30 pm

This talk will review the most relevant publications in the subfield of Journalistic Translation Research (JTR), starting with the introduction of “transediting” in 1989. This term was coined by Karen Stetting to refer to the processes involved in news translation and has become a useful (and contested) word in JTR. While some have often use it in their research (van Doorslaer, Hernández Guerrero, Valdeón), others posit that it is unnecessary to have a specific term to refer to news translation (Schäffner, Bassnett). The talk will consider the two main approaches to news translation, namely studies of the processes and studies of the products, and discuss the connections between JTR and Communication Studies, from which JTR has borrowed a number of concepts and methods, such as that of framing.

2. The concept of translation in Translation and Journalism Studies

7 November 2018, 9.30 – 11.00 am

This talk will explore the concept of “translation” in Translation and Journalism Studies. 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, it will interrogate the lack of interaction between translation and journalism studies by examining how “translation” in the latter. After providing the definition in general dictionaries and in some translation studies reference works, with particular reference to Delisle et al, the talk will present the findings of a study of a corpus of 186 articles written by journalism studies scholars. The results of the study show that these researchers use “translation” to refer to linguistic transfer as well as to other more general transformations. It also demonstrates that “transediting”, widely used in journalistic translation research, is rarely used in the publications by journalism studies scholars.

3. Methods and topics in Journalistic Translation Research

7 November 2018, 2.00 – 3.30pm

In this talk, I will present some of the methodological approaches used in the study of journalistic translation, notably corpus-based and case studies, but will also provide some information on ethnographic approaches, which have been used (albeit not frequently) to analyse the process of translation in the news room. I will also present some of the topics that researchers from North America, Europe and China have been delved into, e.g. political texts, editorials and opinion columns and hard news.

About the speaker:

Roberto A. Valdeón is Professor in English Studies at the University of Oviedo, Spain. He is a Member of Academia Europaea, Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, and General Editor of the Benjamins Translation Library. He has published over a hundred articles, books and book chapters, including contributions to Across Languages and Cultures, Meta, Intercultural Pragmatics, Terminology, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Target, Babel, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Languages in Contrast, Philological Quarterly, Journalism, Translation Studies, and Translating and Interpreting Studies. He is Honorary Professor at Jinan University (China) and at the University of Stirling (UK). (cited from: https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra/publishinginTS/roberto-a-valdeon)