On the [translated] record: Journalistic translation and creative agency in India’s multilingual reporting

Abstract

This paper considers what influences the translation process for writers in Indian journalism: tools that guide, and structures that constrict. From in-depth interviews with Indian journalists conducted in New Delhi from 2018 to 2019, I examine creative agency in the context of multilingual reporting in India, to examine news stories not just as factual bytes of daily events but as creatively written short essays of journalistic translation. Indian journalists offer perspective on their writing processes from the initial assignment of a story idea to the fruition of the piece in publication. This research delves into how Indian journalists think about the multilingual reporting they do and the attention they pay to journalistic translation when moving from a spoken Hindi interview to an English-language article. I broadly interrogate the skopos, or aim, of journalistic translation in the context of Indian news, noting the vernacular push-and-pull of multilingual reporting disseminated in Hindi and English, or other Indian languages. I investigate how Indian journalists cope with moments of the “untranslatable” in their everyday work, if and when they recognize situations of journalistic translation, and what they consider to be underlying impacts of translated news in multilingual reporting from India. Journalists have creative agency in the way they share information that influences the skopos of multilingual reporting. Thus, the language transferred from sources to readers takes on new meanings that can have major impacts on audiences’ reading of news stories.