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Corpus-based Study of News Translation: Challenges and Possibilities

Keywords: news translation, corpus linguistics, journalistic translation research, CADS, post-translation

Abstract:

Recognising that disciplinary confines often represent serious hurdles for translation scholars, this article offers a reflection on the boundaries of the subarea of news translation within the discipline of Translation Studies, focusing on its links with research that employs corpus-aided techniques, in particular critical discourse analysis and corpus-assisted discourse studies. Reviewing a number of relevant studies and research projects that use different types of corpora, the discussion explores some of the main difficulties inherent in analysing translated news texts, which are often heavily mediated and edited in various ways; the ensuing key challenges associated with conducting journalistic translation research are examined. The article calls for mutual recognition and cross-fertilisation between disciplines that investigate translated news from different, usually complementary, perspectives. In particular, the study of ideology and bias in translated news benefits from composite approaches and multi-faceted research projects that combine methods drawn from different areas: we argue that open and inclusive approaches are vital to uncover new and important insights into news translation.

1. Introduction and theoretical background

As Gambier and van Doorslaer (2016:1) point out, Translation Studies (TS) has always been presented and conceived as a “polydiscipline”, drawing from neighbouring disciplines like linguistics, contrastive linguistics, applied linguistics to name but a few. The news genre was among the last ones to be investigated under the lens of TS: this late interest was at least partly due to the fact that the analysis of news translation tends to defy institutional borderlines. Researchers face several challenges: the identification of a source text and a target text is hard, given the huge amount of editing that typically characterises the production and circulation of multilingual news; the notions of fidelity or loyalty are called

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into question; and the neutrality of the investigator is put to the test due to issues of bias and ideology in (translated) news.

In surveying the development of Journalistic Translation Research (JTR), Valdeón (2015) traces its links with communication studies, cultural studies, applied linguistics, and ethnography. Valdeón (2015:654) specifies in particular that he prefers the term ‘journalistic translation’ to ‘news translation’, because many of the studies cover interpretative and argumentative texts, rather than only informative ones (see also Valdeón, 2017). Several scholars (e.g. Bielsa and Bassnett 2009; Valdeón 2015; Conway and Bassnett 2006) have investigated the ways in which the translation of news texts requires an interdisciplinary research approach. More generally, in a wide-ranging discussion of its status and remit as a discipline, Arduini and Nergaard suggest that TS could prove a new powerful “epistemological instrument for reading and assessing the transformation and exchange of cultures and identities” (2011:14), proposing the inauguration of “a trans-disciplinary research field with translation as an interpretive as well as operative tool” (ibid.:8). This is the notion of post-translation studies proposed by Gentzler (2017), who also calls for expansion beyond the (self-imposed) boundaries of TS.

Our work was inspired by the observations made by Partington, Duguid and Taylor about “cross-linguistic discourse analysis”: analysing the representation of migrants in the Italian and UK press, they underline the need for the researcher in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) “to have an awareness of translation issues and practices” (2013:206). This article, then, addresses the question of the role that TS can play in the corpus-aided investigation of news reporting across different languages. We start by drawing a parallel between JTR and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), highlighting the prominence of ideology and observing the introduction of corpus-aided techniques in both sub-disciplines. Then, drawing upon Mona Baker’s (1995) tripartite division of corpora used in TS, we shall survey published works in TS where corpus techniques have been employed to investigate translated news texts. We shall then move on to the observation of some corpus-aided research that appears to have much in common with TS and JTR, but which does not explicitly refer to TS scholarship. Finally, we will discuss the difficulties facing scholars undertaking corpus-aided news translation research projects, with the aim of pointing out challenges and possibilities within and beyond the strict boundaries of TS.

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The analysis of the translation of news texts is one of the most recent developments within TS, which is itself a relatively young discipline. The recognition of TS can be traced back to the 1980s (Bassnett and Lefevere 1990), while the establishment of news translation as a sub-discipline dates from the early 2000s (Bielsa 2016:199). In his survey of what had been published in the first fifteen years of JTR, Valdeón (2015) underlines that the ideological element in the analysis of translated news texts is particularly prominent. He states:

Ideology has remained at the basis of many of these studies, which have explored how translation modifies the message of the original text in order to emphasize the editorial line of the news medium where the final text is published. (Valdeón 2015:647)

Holland (2013) presents a similar point of view and warns JTR scholars, pointing out that academic studies of news translation appear to share an underlying theme as they often state that the media systematically misrepresent events. Holland argues that “as academics, and as linguists in particular, we should avoid the misrepresentation of the media in simplistic ways even when our goal is to critique mediatized misrepresentations of the world” (Holland 2013:343). This tendency to focus on ideological aspects could damage the credibility of JTR, especially in the eyes of scholars outside mainstream TS, in a way that is reminiscent of the challenges faced by another approach that deals with ideology and (mis)representation in the media, i.e. CDA. Wodak (Kendall 2007:para 17) – one of the most prominent scholars in CDA – defines the approach as a process that allows “making opaque structures of power relations and ideologies manifest”. Just like JTR, CDA is a relatively recent area of study bringing together different approaches and disciplines, mostly – but not exclusively – focusing on language.

These turns within linguistics-oriented disciplines towards ideological aspects of language use and communication are certainly not isolated cases, as a parallel could be drawn between the two above-mentioned approaches and the relatively recent move towards ideological issues witnessed among corpus linguists (see McEnery and Hardie 2012:16-18). Discussing methodological synergies, Paul Baker et al. (2008:273) explain: “we do not view CDA as being a method nor are specific methods solely associated with it. Instead, it adopts any method that is adequate to realize the aims of specific CDA-inspired research”. This definition is from a paper in which the authors explain why bringing together CDA and Corpus Linguistics (CL) would likely enrich both fields, given the tendency of CDA to deal

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mainly with qualitative approaches and the possibility offered by CL to provide a quantitative methodological basis supporting large-scale investigations.

CDA has been criticised because of its lack of objectivity (see e.g. Breeze 2011), and one of the attempts made to respond to such criticism and achieve higher levels of objectivity – while obtaining results that allow deepening our knowledge of how power is exerted through language – consisted exactly in bringing together CDA approaches and methods employing CL. According to Partington et al. (2013:5), CL is “that set of studies into the form and/or function of language which incorporate the use of computerised corpora in their analyses”, while the CADS approach is situated at the intersection between CL and CDA. In this regard, Partington et al. (2013:10) define CADS as the “set of studies into the form and/or function of language as communicative discourse which incorporate the use of computerised corpora in their analyses”. This article stems from the observation that JTR also tends to deal mainly with qualitative approaches and often focuses on the role of translation processes and translators themselves in shaping “opaque structures of power relations and ideologies” (Kendall 2007:para 17). As a consequence, the suggestion that JTR can benefit from incorporating CL techniques appears a promising idea worth investigating in the interest of consolidating the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this growing area of research.

3. JTR combining Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies

Of course the application of corpora to TS is not new: following Baker’s (1995) programmatic statements about their usefulness and potential, Olohan (2004) provides a comprehensive overview of relevant work in this area. But neither scholar was concentrating on JTR as such, because by 2004 news translation was hardly ever taken into account as a form of translation to be investigated systematically in its own right. Nevertheless, the following tripartite division of corpora suggested by Baker (1995) can be used to classify studies employing corpora in translation research:

Comparable corpora “consist of two separate collections of texts in the same language: one corpus consists of original texts in the language in question and the other consists of translations in that language from a given source language or languages” (ibid.:234);

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Parallel corpora are made up of “original, source language-texts in language A and their translated versions in language B” (ibid.:230);

Multilingual corpora involve “sets of two or more monolingual corpora in different languages, built up either in the same or different institutions on the basis of similar design criteria” (ibid.:232).

In the attempt to establish whether JTR could benefit from a more intensive employment of CL, we shall start by illustrating the few works investigating news translation through a corpus-aided approach. We review studies that employ some form of CL and focus on the translation process of journalistic texts, i.e. texts distributed by news providers including news media (printed, online and audio-visual) and news agencies. The aim of this overview is to verify whether any of these works have employed multilingual corpora – as defined by Baker (1995) – to approach the translation analysis in a discourse-oriented perspective. Laviosa (2002) investigates the representation of Europe in translated and original English newspaper articles through the analysis of the collocational patterning of a set of keywords relating to Europe, i.e. Europe, European, European Union, EU and Union. The aim of her investigation is to unveil, in the context of political discourse and in one text genre, how an aspect of British cultural identity is expressed in original and translated English. The newspapers under scrutiny are The Guardian and The European. Her work can be considered one of the first publications in TS dealing with JTR and adopting CL methods.

As we will discuss in more detail below, one of the challenges posed by the use of CL in TS is the need to compare corpora in different languages. Laviosa’s investigation overcomes this issue by working on original and translated texts in the same language, English in her case. According to Baker’s (1995) terminology, these would then be labelled “comparable corpora”. Gaspari (2013) adopts a similar approach to present a phraseological comparison of international news agency reports published online, looking at the lexical bundles found in the English-language output of the Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA), Adnkronos, Reuters and United Press International (UPI). The investigation compares online news reports issued by two of the leading news agencies based in Italy (ANSA and Adnkronos) and two reputable international news agencies with headquarters in English-speaking countries, i.e. Reuters and UPI. The English-language news reports by ANSA and Adnkronos result from a complex, and largely unpredictable, combination of editorial processes:

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They may be based to some extent on content already available in English, partly translated from original Italian sources, occasionally by journalists, or written from scratch by non-native speakers of English, sometimes as part of cross-linguistic summaries, and subsequently edited or revised. The addition of explanations or background knowledge for the benefit of international readers is not unusual when the news has a strong Italian focus. This complex scenario gives rise to heavily mediated texts. (Gaspari 2013:online)

This tendency to mediate news texts “heavily” entails that an attempt to create and analyse parallel corpora of news texts would normally pose a number of complex challenges to the TS scholar that are not encountered when working on more traditional and straightforward parallel corpora. For example, working on “plurilingual processes” in two news agencies, Davier (2014:63) claims that “the impossibility of alignment provides additional evidence that all traditional traces of translation are erased. This is also why I gave up the idea of composing a parallel corpus of news dispatches: all potential source texts are made invisible in the resulting text in the target language”. Her project paired an ethnographic investigation and the analysis of a multilingual corpus of news items, but, she specifies, her approach is not quantitative (2017:208).

A ‘unidirectional parallel corpus’ of news agency dispatches was collected by McLaughlin (2011:21) and employed to investigate syntactic borrowing from English into French. McLaughlin’s focus is on the effects of translation on the French language, rather than on the translation process itself, which would have been Davier’s goal; this difference might explain their opposite decisions concerning the collection of a parallel corpus. In a subsequent investigation, McLaughlin (2015) employed the same corpus to investigate lexical borrowings, hence, in both cases, her focus is not on the level of discourse.

Panou’s (2014) study is based on a 101,202-word sample of 2009 Greek news material taken from the Sunday edition of the Kathimerini newspaper, translated from The Economist, and contrasted with its source version with respect to the way idiomatic expressions are rendered. According to Baker’s (1995) tripartite division, this would be considered a parallel corpus. Panou’s work is – to our best knowledge – the only published volume that deals with the translation of news articles and employs CL methods to observe translation strategies in a parallel corpus. However, the ideological element is not prominent, as the author focuses on the translation of idioms with the aim of providing useful tools “to bridge the gap between linguistic theory and educational practice” (2014:5). It is also important to notice that Panou

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refers to the corpus as a “sample”: as we shall discuss later, sampling implies important choices and implications when dealing with CL. As for the methodology employed, she states that “both manual and software search were combined in order to find out how idioms have been translated in the Greek financial press” (2014:8).

A few ongoing projects involve the use of CL to investigate news articles also from a CDA perspective. The largest one of these is being carried out by Boulanger and Gagnon (this volume and forthcoming). Other ongoing projects bringing together JTR and CL that we are aware of are two PhD research projects, one by Aragrande (2015), who is working on audio-visual data from three different sources to investigate issues concerning migrations and migrants, and the other by Mariani (2016), who investigates translation policies and practices in EU institutions. The multilingual and translational core of the corpus collected by Aragrande is represented by Euronews online video-news in its English and Italian versions. Complementing this small parallel corpus, two additional comparable corpora of newscast recordings gathered from three monolingual channels were compiled: BBC One newscasts, Rai and Rainews24. Aragrande (2016:19, emphasis in the original) points out the need for CDA, CL and TS to “converge in order to analyse and better understand issues of translation and multilingualism in journalism as a discourse”. Mariani’s work (forthcoming) consists in the investigation of migration-related terminology in a collection of press releases and newsletters from the EU Parliament. Her corpus is parallel and she employs quantitative CL through the use of Sketch Engine.

If we refer back to Baker’s (1995) corpus typology, we can notice that the third kind of corpora – multilingual – has hardly ever been employed to investigate news discursive practices from a TS perspective, by comparing discourse in two or more different languages. Only very recently scholars have started challenging this boundary: Conway (2011), Davier (2014) and the forthcoming works by Gagnon and Boulanger represent a novelty in the field. The creation of multilingual corpora as defined by Baker (1995:232) (e.g. original newspaper articles about the same topic published in a selection of newspapers in various languages that are deemed similar, for example, in terms of time span, type or focus of the news, etc.) would hardly be recognised as a proper TS project by mainstream TS scholars, as the presence of a translation process would not be self-evident.

Given the innovative theoretical and methodological nature of these approaches, the terminology employed to describe the corpora still represents an issue. Gagnon and Boulanger’s work (this volume), for example, would correspond to Baker’s “multilingual” typology, but they label their corpus as “comparable” following Laviosa’s (2013)

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terminology. This could prove confusing, as for Baker’s classic typology the label “comparable” implies the presence of a single language, the comparison being between original and translated texts

4. Multilingual Corpora, Skopos and News Values

As many scholars have pointed out (e.g. Bielsa and Bassnett 2009; Tsai 2005; Orengo 2005), the translation process in news texts is a complex phenomenon carried out along with rewriting and editing. Hence, approaching JTR by focusing on the comparison between a clearly recognisable source text and the corresponding target text, even if heavily modified, is likely to significantly narrow down the number of potential research projects. The strict separation between parallel and multilingual corpora seems to be hardly applicable to the reality of some kinds of translation, particularly in the news and journalistic domains, as well as in increasingly popular scenarios of shared authoring, collaborative translation and cross-linguistic editing, most notably on Wikipedia. To overcome this admittedly inadequate dichotomy, recognising the difficulty of analysing monodirectional translation in the traditional sense, from clearly defined source languages/texts into obvious target language/text counterparts, Gaspari (2015) proposes a “comparallel” corpus methodology, emphasising that in some scenarios the identification of corresponding source and target units cannot be operationalised.

Given the heterogeneity – both geographical and cultural – that characterises the target audience of news translated and distributed globally, it is hard to establish what the Skopos (Nord 2013) of a specific translation might be, especially if we are dealing with news texts translated into English (Holland 2013:335) and published online. These end up serving a global and multicultural audience, thus involving significant cultural, in addition to linguistic, mediation, e.g. to uncover implied references, explain background information and possibly to redress ideological biases (Gaspari 2013).

Research carried out by scholars beyond the boundaries of TS can help find answers to these kinds of questions, and in this case Bednarek and Caple’s work on news values (2012) can prove useful when trying to establish the Skopos of news translation. They envisage two perspectives, cognitive and discursive (ibid.:44): the beliefs and internalised assumptions that people hold belong to the cognitive sphere, and they are applied when people have to decide whether something is to be considered newsworthy. According to the two scholars, this is a subjective process and every journalist and every editor will hold different views concerning

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such beliefs. Hence the cognitive perspective depends on the individuals, while the discursive perspective focuses on how newsworthiness is construed through discourse.

Going back to Valdeon’s and Holland’s caveat reported above, we believe that this double perspective, cognitive and discursive, could prove helpful for TS scholars analysing the translation of news texts and focusing on the way in which ideology and manipulation are treated. News discourse and news values depend on language and culture; Bednarek and Caple specify that their own research focuses on the English-speaking news of the ‘Western’ world (2012:5), but comparative research exists (to name but a few studies in this area, focusing on Italy and English-speaking countries, Haarman and Lombardo 2009; Semino 2002; Pounds 2010 – see the next section). The boundary separating TS from corpus-based comparative studies appears to be between texts and discourses, i.e. meaning beyond the clause and the constitutive role that meaning plays in social life (Martin and Rose 2003). If we consider existing works in TS, the majority of those dealing with news translation focus mainly on texts, observing source and target while the mentioned corpus-based comparative studies approaches focus on discourse. Nevertheless, when we take into account the amount of interlinguistic and intercultural editing that a translated news text is likely to be subjected to, this boundary separating the analysis of texts and the analysis of discourses becomes more blurred. The next section clarifies why we believe that this issue concerning disciplinary boundaries is particularly relevant.

5. Outside the boundaries of TS (but very close)

In order to explain why we advocate broadening the horizons of TS as far as news translation is concerned, in this section we report a selection of works – by scholars who are not likely to consider themselves experts in translation – that deal with topics that translation scholars would recognise as relevant and close to their field. Nevertheless, these works hardly ever mention TS as a discipline and, when they occasionally refer to “translation”, they draw upon notions of word-to-word, literal translation, i.e. something very distant from the way TS scholars have conceptualised JTR.

Given the vast number of works investigating journalistic discourse, and due to our own working languages, here we cover a selection of publications, concentrating on a sample that we consider representative and focusing on the English-Italian language pair. Pounds (2010) explores to what extent the most impersonal ‘reporter voice’ (Martin and White 2005) in English hard news reported in the press is present in Italian reporting. Her work defines itself

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as belonging to “comparative studies” (Pounds 2010:112), and according to Baker’s (1995) terminology the investigation uses a multilingual corpus, albeit an admittedly small one for the standards of present-day mainstream CL:

Twenty-eight articles were, therefore, analysed overall: 14 from two of the most established Italian broadsheets (seven from Corriere della Sera and seven from La Repubblica) and 14 from equivalent English broadsheets (seven from the [sic] The Guardian and seven from The Times). The articles were published between 2006 and 2009, mostly in 2008. (Pounds 2010:115)

In her article, Pounds employs the word “translation” twice and in both cases the word collocates with “literal”. Nevertheless, her observations and conclusions are certainly relevant for TS scholars and also for translator training, as she demonstrates how a close linguistic comparison between journalistic styles reveals different approaches from different schools of journalism – that she labels “Anglo-American” vs. “Western European” and which correspond to ‘objective’ and ‘interpretative’ styles.

While Pounds (2010) does not employ CL techniques, there are other works dealing with journalistic discourse and based on a multilingual corpus. An example is Semino’s investigation of metaphorical representations of the euro in British and Italian newspapers (2002). In this paper as well, we notice the absence of reference to the word “translation”, which appears only once to specify that at least one of the occurrences of a war metaphor in English is “a translation of a metaphorical expression used in an Italian newspaper” (Semino 2002:19). But, just as in Pounds’ case, the topics debated are certainly of interest to TS scholars, as Semino observes the ideological implications of metaphorical choices and the different effects the choice of one metaphorical domain over another can have on readers’ perception. Moreover, she shows how a general tendency to favour one domain over another in a specific language is likely to generate different perceptions of the topic itself, the euro in this case, in two different language communities.

One more example is the work by Haarman and Lombardo (2009), which was part of the CorDis project, a qualitative and quantitative linguistic analysis of political and media discourse on the conflict in Iraq in 2003, which employed CADS methods. It is worth pointing out that these cross-cultural or comparative research projects in general do not refer to TS publications, even if their work is relevant to that of translation scholars and, we would argue, this may be reciprocal. We would thus suggest that an attempt to interconnect the two

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approaches would prove mutually enriching, in a similar fashion to the recent choice of interconnecting TS and imagology (van Doorslaer, Flynn and Leersen 2015), underlining how both disciplines have dealt with representations of national identities and stereotypes. If linking TS and imagology makes perfect sense given their common interest which scholars pursued separately, it may prove surprising to learn that a volume resulting from a linguistics-oriented project about the European identity (Bayley and Williams 2012) makes no reference to either discipline. The project investigates how Europe is represented linguistically in the news media of four European countries, namely France, Italy, Poland, and the UK, through the use of an electronic corpus built from newspapers and television news transcripts. The authors describe their work as comparative, stating that the method employed throughout the book consists in “juxtaposing the journalist representations of Europe in two or more languages” (ibid.: cover copy).

By pointing out the lack of connection between the above-mentioned disciplines we by no means intend to criticize the work of these scholars. Rather, our aim is to point out the potential enrichment that both disciplines could obtain from a higher degree of interaction, going beyond the existing disciplinary boundaries. The new socially-oriented “turns” in language-focused disciplines that have been developing in recent years appear to create sub-disciplines that have much in common and are kept separate by the simple fact that their respective overarching disciplines have little in common and were traditionally considered separate from one another. Davier (2017:25) as well underlines that institutional constraints may be responsible for the almost total absence of studies focusing on news translation in specific countries, due to the fact that translation researchers belong to linguistics- or literature-oriented departments.

In a similar fashion, a few quotations from Partington et al.’s chapter (2013:187-208) focusing on the “representation of migrants in the Italian and UK press” can show the closeness this kind of study has to JTR. Its authors describe the process of observing news articles in the two languages as “cross-linguistic discourse analysis”. They state that there is “some overlap with comparative corpus-based discourse studies”, claiming that their work “is a kind of comparative study with very practical implications, for instance, for translation work” (ibid.:188). In addition, they observe that “from a methodological point of view, […] cross-linguistic CADS is an exciting area as there has been relatively little work done to date, with even less conducted on more than two languages” (ibid.:206).

In her paper about “translation-related challenges” – which was another output of the above-mentioned research project about the representation of migrants – Taylor (2009) explains the

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difficulties she faced when working on the project, due to the impossibility, in some cases, of identifying functional equivalents for the search terms to be employed by the corpus linguist. She states that there are cases in which it is possible to identify a “lack of cohesion between the English to Italian definitions and the Italian to English definitions”. As an example, she quotes the word “immigrants”, translated with extracomunitari (a very common way of referring to immigrants, although often wrong, as many immigrants are from within Europe). In the opposite translation direction, however, extracomunitari can be translated with “immigrants” as the target-language word includes the meaning of the Italian – immigrants from outside Europe are immigrants but not all immigrants are from outside Europe.

Another significant example is the wide-ranging Changing Climates project (Dayrell et al. 2016), resulting from collaboration between the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science and the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. The project consisted in the collection and investigation of a multilingual corpus to examine how climate change was framed in major newspapers across four countries, i.e. Britain, Brazil, Germany and Italy, between 2003 and 2013. Different to projects of the same kind, this one did not sample the news articles but included as many as possible, following Gabrielatos’ method (2007) to select the query words and phrases.

We surmise that many of those articles are the result of a process of translation, editing and rewriting news items coming from the same news agency or international organisation such as the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). In order for the research to be considered a proper TS/JTR project, scholars in mainstream TS would probably deem it necessary to reconstruct the source-target path – which would prove very time-consuming and probably unfeasible in most cases – in order to carry out a text-to-text analysis. The Changing Climates project itself aims to compare the corpora focusing on discourse and scholars both within and beyond TS do not tend to regard such activity as one that belongs to JTR.

6. Final remarks: challenges and possibilities for CL in JTR

We feel that the theoretical, methodological and operational challenges involved in corpus-based approaches to studying translated news and journalistic texts should not thwart attempts to combine the strengths of CL and CDA in this exciting field. In this article we have argued that there seem to be huge opportunities for cross-fertilisation, that can in turn help progress by stimulating creative and innovative solutions. While adopting

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straightforward conventional parallel corpus methodologies seems hardly feasible in most news translation scenarios (as discussed in Sections 3 and 4), in our view the issue becomes how to devise methodological and analytical set-ups that leverage the potential of all the disciplines involved, without jeopardising the integrity and effectiveness of the experimental frameworks.

The comparallel corpus analysis methodology proposed by Gaspari (2015) may offer one such viable solution, although the author himself is cautious in recognising that due to the exploratory nature of the first study adopting this approach, which involved very peculiar institutional texts in English and Italian, “the scalability of the comparallel corpus methodology for the analysis of multilingual phraseology in translation remains an open issue” (ibid.:346). In particular, it remains to be seen whether it can be productively extended to the news domain, for instance coping with additional language pairs and texts that are typically heavily mediated when it comes to cultural and topical references. In addition, a separation that seems to hinder effective research in this area concerns the isolated focus on texts, as opposed to the consideration of discourses: although these two levels of analysis are normally considered separately by scholars, as explained at the end of Section 5, they should be easy to reconcile, bringing substantial benefits in terms of a more comprehensive overall appreciation of the interconnected linguistic, translational, ideological, and cultural phenomena at play in news translation.

While we refrain from proposing a single approach to address all the complex methodological and operational issues that have been discussed in the article, we argue in favour of overcoming the disciplinary boundaries that have so far, in our view, hampered the development of JTR. This collaborative shift involves primarily a more open exchange between TS, CL and CDA scholars with a common interest in JTR, also taking on board the theoretical and methodological inputs coming from media and communication studies. We recognise that this process may present inherent difficulties for individual scholars, as there tends to be a gap between the stated institutional interest in inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary research and the reality of the confinements within which researchers and scholars often have to operate, for various reasons.

However, we are convinced of the potential benefits of engaging in inclusive and multi-faceted research agendas, to counter the loss of insight and scholarly progress deriving from working in separate disciplinary silos. By offering an honest assessment of the common issues as well as of the disconnections that we identify in the dynamic area of JTR, this article has attempted to encourage debate that can hopefully instigate closer collaboration across

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fields and between scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds in the future. When considering how CL has managed to grant more accountability and objectivity to CDA, we could be induced to think that the introduction of CL in JTR would prove useful in order to address the dangers of the ideological drift described by Valdeón (2015) and Holland (2013). Nevertheless, once scholars attempt to devise an actual research project bringing together CL and JTR, they face numerous challenges. Analysing corpora in different languages always raises several issues, and only a very small amount of journalistic texts can be classified as “translated” in the traditional sense that would license a straightforward parallel corpus methodology, while most texts are the results of various intertwined stages of editing which usually include translation, in addition to several other, at times rather subtle, operations (see Bielsa and Bassnett 2009).

This makes the identification of a viable JTR project employing CL techniques a challenging task. Still, when observing research projects outside the boundaries of TS, we find linguists and academics of other disciplines discussing issues that are typically found in TS debates. Hence, we believe it is certainly worth attempting to create more connections beyond the boundaries of TS and becoming involved in projects where translation plays an important role, in order to overcome the dangers of scholarly bias and isolation, moving towards post-translation.

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