A mediation model for the translation of radio news texts in a multicultural newsroom

Abstract

Broadcast journalists in South Africa are media workers, editors and translators simultaneously producing news for bilingual or multilingual audiences. News texts  are translated from English into one or more of the other official languages, depending on the target audience of the broadcaster. This article aims to indicate how translation is used in a radio newsroom to develop a model for mediation in a multicultural news environment. Nord’s (2005) looping model is adapted to include further challenges in the translation of stories of conflict, violence and politics. Baker’s (2006) narrative theory and the notion of framing, developed in the literature of social movements, are therefore incorporated in a suggested mediation model, which could also be used as an in-house training model for a multicultural and multilingual newsroom. Narrative theory and framing are used to explore various ways in which translators accentuate, undermine or modify aspects of the narrative(s) encoded in the source text or utterance. The question is not whether the translator is ideologically involved in the text, but how (Naudé, 2009).

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2011, 29(1): 17–29