Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

TWENTY-TWO Translating News

In 1838, when traveling on a slow boat to Trieste, the poet Robert Browning imagined how in times past news was brought from Ghent in Belgium to Aix in Germany:

What he doesn’t say, however, is how the mounted couriers turned the information they bore from Flemish into German, which is what people understand in Aix. In ages past, news rushed from any European A to B would most likely have been issued and received in French. But nowadays we are accustomed to receiving topical information in print and on radio, television, and the Web in our home languages, with minimal lag between event and report. But how do good and bad tidings now get from Shenzhen to Chicago, from Marseille to Melbourne, from Rio to Ryazan? Electronic media account for the speed but do not explain how political and human events deemed to be news happen in a language that is rarely our own but reach us almost instantaneously in the language that is.

The quantity of information flowing around the globe in uncountable languages might be taken to suggest that in some hidden anthill a busy troop of language insects lives on permanent standby, ready to turn news from any of the world’s languages into all the others at the drop of a hat. But it can’t be so, because that would require almost 49 million separate teams of language ants (see here)—and a human anthill of that size would be difficult to hide. Even if a hypothetical global news translation HQ served only 80 vehicular languages, it would still require 6,320 different language desks. Given a forty-hour workweek for each translator and allowing for sudden peaks in demand when great events happen in Paris or Peoria, you couldn’t house the enterprise in anything less than the Empire State Building. But no skyscraper in New York, London, or Rio houses a world news translation center. In fact, news bureaus the world over have hardly any translators on their staff at all. Like the lawyer-linguists at the European Court of Justice, language mediators in the news business are almost always something else as well.

Most of the world’s languages are spoken by quite small groups, and news media do not exist in many of these tongues. Even so, there are hundreds of languages—perhaps more than a thousand—that have some modest level of news service in print or on the air. Latin, for example, has daily thirty-minute news bulletins broadcast from Helsinki; Gaelic has seven hours of programming per day, part of which is news, on BBC Alba TV. But most consumer news media don’t make the news, save on rare occasions. Most of them are themselves consumers of worldwide agency services, called wires, which process and put out news in no more than half a dozen tongues. The main hubs are Reuters (the first news agency in the world, founded in 1851), Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Press (AFP), and Inter Press Service (IPS), massively supplemented in recent years by CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC on the Web, and, for financial news especially, the Bloomberg wire.[144]

News of flooding in Bangladesh or a coup d’état in Rwanda or Kyrgyzstan does not come to you, wherever you are, from Dhaka, Kigali, or Bishkek. It comes to your local news source from the agencies, in English, French, Spanish, German (all agencies), Portuguese (Reuters, AFP), Dutch (AP only), or Arabic (Reuters since 1954 and AFP since 1969). It is rewritten almost instantaneously by journalists working for your local paper or radio station from whichever language version they receive from one or more of the wires. The global transmission languages are those of the colonial empires of the nineteenth century, plus Arabic. Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Indonesian, and all other languages are not in the game.

Journalists who compose the articles and stories you actually read often have language skills, but they do not think of themselves as translators. They would be offended if you said that’s what they are—even if some news stories you can read in the London press, for example, are very close indeed to what you read in yesterday’s Le Monde. Journalists think of their jobs as turning plain information into arresting, entertaining, or readable prose suited to the culture, interests, and knowledge of the people who read them—and that’s more than what most people think translation is. The pecking order is reflected in pay and conditions of service the world over: “journalist” outranks “translator” everywhere.

The language operations performed in news-agency work are of particular interest because they are predicated not only on the total invisibility of translation but also on anonymity and impersonality. A note originating in language A reaching an agency desk is transformed into a wire in language B in a way that fits it for reuse in the culture of language B without respect for any of the discursive, stylistic, or cultural features of the original. Agency work does not seek to respect the text or its origin, only the facts that lie behind the narrative. The resulting wire is a collective composition and also a reduction or expansion attributable to no one individual, only to the service provider. The wire text is then reformulated in the other languages in which that particular agency operates, again with additions and subtractions, all designed to achieve maximum clarity and usefulness in languages C through N, and made available worldwide so as to be rewritten a fourth time in any of the languages used by subscribers to the service. In its fourth redaction the story may be completely recontextualized in a news article attributed to a local journalist. That is to say, before you read a speech in English originally made in Tehran and in Farsi about an hour after it has been uttered, it may have been reformulated in Arabic by Al Jazeera’s man in Iran, then rewritten as an English wire by the AP bureau in Kuwait before being rephrased by a journalist in London; similarly, the news of an earthquake in Thailand may have been first reported in French by AFP’s Bangkok bureau and then issued on AFP’s English-language service from Paris before being rewritten into Farsi for the Iranian TV news a few minutes later. The structure of this elaborate network of skilled professionals producing international news ensures that the different language versions of a given note do not ever say exactly the same thing. They are held to communicate the same information, but the ways in which it is communicated are calibrated to well-founded assumptions about the political, social, religious, intellectual, moral, and other sensitivities that are prevalent in the receiving language and culture.

In these circumstances, how can you possibly know that the news is true? Well, you can’t. You just trust the news, which means that even if you don’t realize it and often claim the opposite in dinner party talk, you trust journalist-translators completely. How else could you believe that you know the first thing about what’s going on in the world?

Paradoxically, but not unreasonably, global news is a local product. This is not because of any linguistic obstacles to the circulation of information. Rather, it is because communication tasks in this field are subordinated to the real or perceived constraints imposed by the receiver. To get the nugget of new news from Ghent to Aix, contemporary postilions adjust, adapt, excise, or add almost anything to the source save that part of the reference deemed to be “news.” In a relatively short rhetorical leap, you could use this to reassert the radical position that all facts about the world are linguistic constructions and nothing else. But news agencies and the people who work in them are not interested in deconstruction. They pursue their trade with the firm conviction that the information they disseminate in different linguistic and rhetorical versions lies beyond language, in the domain of the real.

The way that translating is integrated into other kinds of language work in global news distribution is far from unique. In transnational law (at the ECJ, for instance), in diplomacy, and in the work of many international organizations, no precise boundary can be drawn between translation, on the one hand, and drafting, editing, correcting, reformulating, and adapting a text, whether written in the same or in some other tongue, on the other. In these many important domains, translating is just one element in the progressive refinement and wider circulation of texts.

Two side effects of the manner in which news is transmitted among different languages and communities of users are worth noting. The first is that it makes the “translatedness” of news completely invisible. However, even if the occlusion of translation is the express intention of the EU’s language-parity rule, it is not a fatality in the circulation of news and could easily be countered. A report of the latest speech by the Iranian president, for example, could perfectly well be attributed to a named journalist’s adaptation of a Reuters English-language wire originating in Kuwait based on a report in Arabic from Al Jazeera that had provided the information from listening to a radio broadcast in Farsi from Tehran. The second consequence of our collective unwillingness to track the language history of the things we are told by the media is to make us believe that the provision of international news is a straightforward matter, dependent only on the marvels of satellite telephones and data transmission. It is not. It is a burdensome business carried out by talented linguist-journalists working under tight constraints of time.