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Article In: Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts: Online-First Articles

Translating across cultures

Linguistic constraints and textual challenges of translating news releases from Italian into English

 | University of Florence
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Abstract
News releases are the official sources for media professionals and follow specific rules in terms of content construction and organisation in English-speaking cultures (. 2008. “Press Releases as a Hybrid Genre: Addressing the Informative/Promotional Conundrum.” Pragmatics Quarterly 18(1): 9–31. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Wilcox, Derek. L., and Glen T. Cameron. 2012. Public Relations. Strategies and Tactics. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, Pearson.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). It is paramount that news releases translated into English meet the expectations of their target international audience(s) (Hatim, Basil. 2009. “Translating text in context.” In The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, ed. by Jeremy Munday, 36–53. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), in view of the demand of international organisations and businesses and for those institutions catering to international audiences to have contents readily available in English. Such expectations cover the format of the news release (e.g., word number, visual layout), its content organisation (i.e., the inverted pyramid structure) and their compliance with the expected textual features of the English target text (e.g., lexical cohesion, syntactic distribution of the constituents, theme-rheme progression, etc; cf. Halliday, Michael A. K., and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen. 2014. Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. London & New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar).
The paper presents a comparison of the features of an example of a standard news release in Italian with its translation into English. The example under scrutiny pertains to the specialised discourse of the fashion industry (Swanson, Kristen K., and Judith C. Everett. 2008. Writing for the Fashion Business. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), which is among the most globalised and fast-paced industries, and where Made in Italy occupies a prominent position (Aiello, Gaetano, Raffaele Donvito, Laura Grazzini, and Elisa Petrucci. 2016. “The relationship between the territory and fashion events. The case of Florence and Pitti Immagine fashion fairs.” Journal of Global Fashion Marketing 7 (3): 150–165. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The aim of the paper is to advance a proposal for a methodological framework that contributes to break the cultural barrier created by not meeting the expectations of the English-speaking target audience of a news release. The paper also aims at stimulating a reflection on the linguistic and cultural transformations and adaptations that are needed in order to ensure a dynamic equivalence when translating specialised discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Features of the news release
  • 3.Methodological overview
    • 3.1Translation studies — selected key theoretical concepts
    • 3.2Selected fundamentals of textual organisation
    • 3.3Theory U — An overview of the fundamentals
      • 3.3.1The stages of the U process
  • 4.Integrating translation studies, textual organisation, and complex system design: A theory U-informed approach
  • 5.Applying the integrated methodological framework to the source text. Case study: Pitti Fragranze 21 news release
    • 5.1Situational analysis: Listening to the source text and sensing its communicative environment
    • 5.2Structural analysis: — descending the U and seeing the organisational structure
    • 5.3Linguistic analysis: Descending the U and seeing the foundations
    • 5.4Presencing: Identifying the core of the text-to-be
    • 5.5Crystallising: Strategy formation
    • 5.6Prototyping: Towards a motivated target text
    • 5.7Performing: Integrating the inverted pyramid structure
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Critical reflection on findings in relation to research questions
    • 6.2Strengths of the proposed framework
    • 6.3Limitations and directions for future research
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Author queries
  • References
References (39)
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