Localising News: Translation and the ‘Global-national’ Dichotomy

Abstract

Due to the peculiar nature of news texts, the adoption of a theory of ‘localisation’ rather than conventional translation theories accounts more easily for both the commercial nature and the global scale of news distribution. News texts are global products which are distributed through a localisation process involving not only reception by locales of a given text, but also the simultaneous production of more versions of a same news report and the production of a new target text of which translation is only a part and not the translator-journalist's goal. Such a text is tailored for ‘sub-locales’ whose identity is political as well as linguistic. The case of the Italian press is typical, as it shows how a global news report is not only interlinguistically localised into the Italian locale, but also intralinguistically adapted to suit readers' political leanings within the same linguistic locale.