News Translation in the light of Gatekeeping and Transediting: a case study on Euronews

Abstract

In today’s global world news which assumes the role of connecting people together also has the mission of providing an opportunity for cultures to communicate with each other. Euronews ranks among news media assuming this role by disseminating news in 12 different languages and possessing a worldwide readership. Information flow and its transfer has a paramount importance in multilingual news media. In recent years news translation draws the attention of many scholars in the field of Translation Studies. While examining the process of news translation it is possible to refer to two notions: gatekeeping and transediting. The notion of gatekeeping was first introduced by Kurt Lewin in 1947 defining gate as “a gateway, an area in the channel who has the power to change a decision-making authority (Lewin, 1947). Gatekeeper is a person or a board who evaluate news coming from various sources and decide whether they pass “the gate” (White, 1950). The notion of Transediting was presented by Karen Stetting in 1989 in order to provide an explanation for the unspecified border between translation and editing (Stetting, 1989). Journalism is one of the areas in which transediting is applying. Our aim in this research includes introducing the notions of gatekeeping and transediting in news translation and applying Christiane Nord’s 4 functions model. According to this model before conveying the text into its readers we should determine its function. In an effort to do so, in 2006 drawing on Karl Bühler and Roman Jakobson’s models Nord presents a model consisting of phatic, referential, expressive and appellative functions. In our research primarily we will define Nord’s 4 function model, then we will analyze examples of migration themed news disseminated in Euronews from 2015 forward in French and Turkish in three steps. Firstly, news headings will be examined in the context of the 4 function model then the function of the text will be defined within the context of the news text. In the second step examples chosen from the news text will be examined in the context of Transediting. In the last step of the analyses, after a short introduction about the related news sources, their point of view will be defined in the light of the notion of gatekeeping and the findings regarding the news which passed the gate will be evaluated. The purpose of our threefold analysis is to determine the way in which a news media disseminates news to readerships from two different cultures and the changes applied to news texts.