Making translators more visible is a laudable aim and one that clearly resonates in the literary world. However, when we consider news translation, the translator’s visibility is a completely different matter, and Venuti’s foreignization hypothesis ceases to hold any value. In news translation, the dominant strategy is absolute domestication, as material is shaped in order to be consumed by the target audience, so has to be tailored to suit their needs and expectations. Debates about formal and stylistic equivalence that have featured so prominently in literary translation cease to matter in a mode of translation that is primarily concerned with the transmission of information, though ideological shifts remain fundamentally important in all types of translation, as will be discussed more fully later.

Research into the strategies of news translation is still relatively underdeveloped, but already there is interest worldwide in examining the processes of exchange and transfer in the media. For in addition to the international news agencies, global TV channels now transmit news bulletins to millions of people and there is an expectation that news will be broadcast day and night, with regular updates throughout a twenty-four-hour period. The phrase ‘breaking news’ has entered everyday language and news channels use this to heighten expectations and create a sense of anticipation. Regular updates with breaking news are now essential in an age of blogs and internet chat rooms.

If we take the situation of news reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, though the journalists embedded with the troops file their stories at speed, they may still be pre-empted by bloggers who go directly online with their version of events and bypass intermediary organizations such as agencies, translators or journalistic and television bureaus. Speed in transmitting information is vitally important in a highly competitive new market.

Christina Schäffner is an expert in translation and discourse analysis, specializing in the analysis of political discourse. She draws attention to the absence of research into the phenomenon of translation in political text analysis, pointing out that it is through translation that information is made available across linguistic borders and that frequently reactions in one country to statements made in another country ‘are actually reactions to the information as it was provided in translation’ (Schäffner, 2004: 120). Stressing the importance of understanding this, she poses a series of questions about how translators are trained, how they select material, which particular ideological constraints affect translation and what causal conditions seem to give rise to certain types of translation. In short, she highlights gaps in our knowledge about the translation of political discourse, gaps that are just as wide in our understanding of the translation of global news. Research in translation studies into issues of language and power has mainly been applied to discussions of literary texts, but clearly such issues are fundamentally important in the analysis of other discourses also, particularly in the translation of news. What research in this field is starting to show is that translation is one element in a complex set of processes whereby information is transposed from one language into another and then edited, rewritten, shaped and repackaged in a new context, to such a degree that any clear distinction between source and target ceases to be meaningful. This is in total contrast to more established research into translation practice, particularly in the field of literary translation, where discussion is always in some way focused around the idea of the binary distinction between source and target texts. Research into news translation poses questions about the very existence of a source and hence challenges established definitions of translation itself.