When Translation Meets Newswriting: Simplification in Translated Quotations

Abstract

Simplification is one of the translation universals (Baker 1996) and it is often equated with reduced sentence length and lexical complexity. This implies that the translator attempts to ease the reader’s comprehension (Vandevoorde 2020: 17), sometimes “selecting an interpretation, therefore blocking potential others”, raising “the level of explicitness by resolving ambiguity” (Baker 1996: 182). The interplay between simplification and interpretation also characterizes journalistic writing. Journalistic writing requires the simplification of complexity (Cotter 2010: 171), operating within limits related to space and word count and limits related to the readers’ attention. The safest way to overcome them is by using quotations, thus reducing reading complexity (Wasike 2018). Fink and Schudson (2014) coined the term ‘contextualization’ to describe how interpretation, rather than description, has become increasingly important in the journalistic approach towards politicians. As politicians’ political personas are built on the highly interpretive discourse of rhetoric (Price-Thomas and Turnbull 2018), the role played by intermediaries (Dillet 2020) such as journalists may interfere, especially in interlingual translation. This contribution will thus investigate rhetoric, simplification and interpretation in political quotations translated into Italian. The contrastive qualitative analysis will involve articles gathered from press agencies and generalist newspapers covering Hillary Clinton’s concession speech in 2016 and Donald Trump’s victory speech in the same year. The goal is to verify if and how journalistic writing in the form of translated quotations has affected the rhetoric of the speeches, answering the following research questions: 1) does simplification in the translated quotations compromise the rhetoric of the source text? and 2) does simplification in the translated quotations favour a specific interpretation? The analysis will draw on both Rhetorical Political Analysis (RPA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). In RPA, rhetoric is no longer a mere embellishment technique, but rather acts on “the formation, propagation, development and change of ideas in politics” (Atkins and Finlayson 2013: 162). RPA will reveal how persuasion on the one hand and the combination of form and performance of argumentation on the other hand are intrinsic to the content of source and target quotations. CDA (Fairclough 1995; Meyer and Wodak 2015) will be used to contrast the language of the source text and target text and unravel the manipulation deriving from text interpretation with its stylistic and ideological underpinning.