Article published In:
Special inaugural issue: Translating the Extreme[Translation in Society 1:1] 2022
► pp. 83–104
[Translation in Society 1:1] 2022
► pp. 83–104
After the storm
Translating the US Capitol storming in Germany’s right-wing digital media ecosystem
This study investigates the translational practices of far-right activists in Germany through content analysis of storytelling about the January 6 storming of the US Capitol in influential German alternative news websites. Findings reveal how far-right commentators used their intermediary position to re-narrate, translate, and convert ‘mainstream’ accounts of an exceptionally contentious event into stories supporting far-right- wing and extremist identities. Re-narrations of January 6 events characterized protesters as victim-heroes and contrasted them with the true villains responsible for the chaos and violence, which included a broad spectrum of political actors on the ideological left writ large.
Keywords: translation, social movements, ideology, narratives, far right, digital media, mobilization
Article outline
- Politics of translation in digitally mediated information environments
- Translation in mobilization processes
- Far right translations: Contesting the ‘mainstream’ media
- Storytelling in social movements and character ‘polysemy’
- Methods and data: Unpacking translational practices
- Findings
- Ideological positionings in far-right translations: Omitting, selecting, and re-writing political events
- Self-positioning as alternative media experts
- Re-narrating political events through victim-heroes and martyr character tropes
- Discussion and conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References
Adams, Josh, and Roscigno, Vincent J.
2005 “White Supremacists, Oppositional Culture and the World Wide Web.” Social Forces 84 (2): 759–778. 
Alexander, Jeffrey. C., and Philip Smith
1993 “The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies.” Theory and Society 51 (2): 151–207.
Atton, Chris
2006 “Far-Right Media on the Internet: Culture, Discourse and Power.” New Media & Society 8 (4): 573–587.
Baele, Stephane, Brace Lewys, and Travis Coan
2021 “Variations on a Theme? Comparing 4chan, 8kun, and Other chans’ Far-Right ‘/pol’ Boards.” Perspectives on Terrorism 15 (1): 65–80.
Baker, Mona
2013 “Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action.” Social Movement Studies 12 (1): 23–47.
2014 “Translation as Re-Narration.” In Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, edited by Mona Baker, 158–177. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
2016 “Beyond the Spectacle: Translation and Solidarity in Contemporary Protest Movements.” In Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution, edited by Mona Baker, 1–18. Abingdon: Routledge.
2018 Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. London and New York: Routledge.
Bánhegyi, Mátyás
2017 “Identifying Political and Ideological Bias in Translated Newspaper Articles: The Political Bias Screener.” Forum 15 (1): 1–27.
Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts
2018 Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bennett, W. Lance, and Barbara Pfetsch
2018 “Rethinking Political Communication in a Time of Disrupted Public Spheres.” Journal of Communication 681: 243–253.
Berry, Jeffrey M., and Sarah Sobieraj
2013 The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Blee, Kathleen. M., and Kimberley A. Creasap
2010 “Conservative and Right- Wing Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology 361: 269–286.
Boéri, Julie
2008 “A Narrative Account of the Babels vs. Naumann Controversy.” The Translator 14 (1): 21–50.
Caiani, Manuela, and Linda Parenti
[2013] 2016 European and American Extreme Right Groups and the Internet. London and New York: Routledge.
Chadwick, Andrew
2017 The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Doerr, Nicole
2017 “How Right-Wing versus Cosmopolitan Political Actors Mobilize and Translate Images of Immigrants in Transnational Contexts.” Visual Communication 16 (3): 315–336.
2018 Political Translation: How Social Movement Democracies Survive. New York: Cambridge University Press.
2019 “Activists as Political Translators? Addressing Structural Inequality and Positional Misunderstandings in Refugee Solidarity Coalitions in Germany and Denmark.” In Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges: Contemporary Social Movements in Europe and North America, edited by Jill Irvine, Sabine Lang, and Celeste Montoya, 189–207. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
2021a “Social Movements and Translation.” In The Politics of Translation in International Relations, edited by May Grasten, Zeynep Gulsah Capan, and Dos Reis Filip, 151–171. Hamburg: Springer.
2021b “The Visual Politics of the Alternative for Germany (AfD): Anti- Islam, Ethno-Nationalism, and Gendered Images.” Social Sciences 10 (1): 20.
Fernández, Fruela
2021 Translating the Crisis: Politics and Culture in Spain after the 15M. London: Routledge.
Fielitz, Maik, and Nick Thurston
eds. 2019 Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right. Online Activism and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
Fine, Gary
2006 “Notorious Support: The America First Committee and the Personalization of Policy.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 11 (4): 405–426.
Freelon, Dean, Alice Marwick, and Daniel Kreiss
2020 “False Equivalencies: Online Activism from Left to Right.” Science 369 (6508): 1197–1201.
Heft, Annett, Curd Knüpfer, Susanne Reinhardt, and Eva Mayerhöffer
2021 “Toward a Transnational Information Ecology on the Right? Hyperlink Networking among Right- Wing Digital News Sites in Europe and the United States.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 26 (2): 484–504.
Holt, Kristoffer, Tina Ustad Figenschou, and Lena Frischlich
2019 “Key Dimensions of Alternative News Media.” Digital Journalism 7 (7): 860–869.
Jasper, James M., Michael Young, and Elke Zuern
2018 “Character Work in Social Movements.” Theory and Society 47 (1): 113–131.
2020 Public Characters: The Politics of Reputation and Blame. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Klapp, Orrin E.
1962 Heroes, Villains and Fools: The Changing American Character. New York: Prentice Hall.
Lewis, Rebecca
2018 “Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube.” Data & Society. Accessed November 29, 2021. [URL]
Lovett, Dustin
2019 “The Politics of Translation in the Press: Siegfried Kracauer and Cultural Mediation in the Periodicals of the Weimar Republic.” In Translation and/in Periodical Publications, edited by María Constanza Guzmán, special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies 14 (2): 265–282.
Marwick, Alice, and Rebecca Lewis
2017 “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online.” Data & Society. Accessed November 29, 2021. [URL]
Messing, Solomon, and Sean Westwood
2012 “Selective Exposure in the Age of Social Media: Endorsements Trump Partisan Source Affiliation when Selecting News Online.” Communication Research 41 (8): 1042–1063.
Miller-Idriss, Cynthia
2017 “Soldier, Sailor, Rebel, Rule-Breaker: Masculinity and the Body in the German Far Right.” Gender and Education 29 (2): 199–215.
Polletta, Francesca
2006 It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2015 “Characters in Political Storytelling.” Storytelling, Self, Society 11 (1): 34–55.
Polletta, Francesca, and Beth Gharrity Gardner
2015a “Narrative and Social Movements.” In The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, edited by Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, 534–548. New York: Oxford University Press.
2015b “Culture and Movements.” In Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn, 1–13. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Polletta, Francesca, and Jessica Callahan
2019 “Deep Stories, Nostalgia Narratives, and Fake News: Storytelling in the Trump Era.” In Politics of Meaning/Meaning of Politics, edited by Jason L. Mast and Jeffrey C. Alexander, 55–73. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rosendo, Lucia Ruiz
2021 “Translation and Interpreting in Conflict.” In The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices, edited by Meng Ji and Sara Laviosa, 45–65. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Sewell, William. H.
1996 “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille.” Theory and Society 25 (6): 841–881.
Spiessens, Anneleen, and Piet Van Poucke
2016 “Translating News Discourse on the Crimean Crisis: Patterns of Reframing on the Russian Website InoSMI.” The Translator 22 (3): 319–339.
Swidler, Anne
1986 “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51 (2): 273–286.
Turcotte, Jason, Chance York, Jacob Irving, Rosanne M. Scholl, and Raymond Pingree
2015 “News Recommendations from Social Media Opinion Leaders: Effects on Media Trust and Information Seeking.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20 (5): 520–535.
Van Aelst, Peter, Jesper Strömbäck, Toril Aalberg, Frank Esser, Claes de Vreese, Jörg Matthes, David Hopmann, Susana Salgado, Nicolas Hubé, Agnieszka Stępińska, Stylianos Papathanassopoulos, Rosa Berganza, Guido Legnante, Carsten Reinemann, Tamir Sheafer, and James Stanyer
2017 “Political Communication in a High-Choice Media Environment: A Challenge for Democracy?” Annals of the International Communication Association 41 (1): 3–27.
van Doorslaer, Luc
2018 “Bound to Expand. The Paradigm of Change in Translation Studies.” In Moving Boundaries in Translation Studies, edited by Helle V. Dam, Matilde Nisbeth Brøgger and Karen Korning Zethsen, 220–230. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Wodak, Ruth
2013 “Anything Goes! – The Haiderization of Europe.” In Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse, edited by Ruth Wodak, Brigitte Mral and Majid KhosraviNik, 1–38. London: Bloomsbury.