Italy’s politicians in the news: journalistic translation and cultural representation

Abstract

In Italy’s Politicians in the News, Denise Filmer investigates the ways in which UK newspapers construct news about Silvio Berlusconi andMatteo Salvini and how translation is used in their representation. Filmer conceptualises journalistic translation on a macro level as a form of cultural translation through which an image of the Other is constructed. On a micro level, she investigates shifts of meaning involved in relaying utterances from Italian into English. Her focus is on translingual quotations, i.e., how translated quotes are embedded in anglophone news narratives on the two Italian politicians. Filmer starts with a concise and critical reflection on key aspects of journalistic translation research relevant for her study, such as invisibility of translation in news reports, positionality of the journalist-translator, and framing practices. She applies a multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis framework to the empirical analyses of articles from popular, mid-market, and quality news brands, comparing translated text embedded in newspaper articles to the respective source text while also paying attention to images or graphics. The results of the investigation are illustrated with four discursive events involving Berlusconi and Salvini that occurred between 2009 and 2019. These events serve as case studies and characterise diverse aspects of translation in the news. They concern (i) a nationalistic media-debate between Il Giornale and the Star, (ii) one of Berlusconi’s sexist comments, (iii) Berlusconi’s controversial remarks regarding Mussolini, and (iv) the Diciotto Crisis of 2018, when Salvini refused to allow asylum seekers to disembark on Italian soil. These detailed comparative studies, which address, for example, using semantically charged adjectives or foregrounding certain aspects of an episode, reveal Filmer’s eye for detail. Filmer shows how various newspapers frame the same discursive event differently, even when they use identical word-for-word renditions of a politician’s utterance. Such examples suggest that translated news agency material is used as a source for the article production. The final case study investigates labels used by news brands in portraying the politicians. Filmer argues that ideological labels (e.g., pre-modifiers such as ‘a far right politician’ for Salvini) can be viewed as a form of cultural translation. Filmer refers to her case studies as ‘mini’ case studies, a rather modest characterisation. Although the examples selected for this book are limited due to space constraints, the actual corpus is larger. The detailed textual analyses of how selected translingual quotations are embedded within the target culture article identify ideological positioning and translation effects in the British news reports. The book convincingly illustrates how translation and reformulation strategies are invisibly intertwined in a news story, thus framing a discursive event in line with the news brand’s political stance. Filmer’s book is a powerful reminder that framing and cultural stereotyping play a significant role in narrating the Other in news discourse. It is thus of interest not only to translation and journalism scholars, or translators and journalists, but also to anybody who relies on newspapers as a source for forming an opinion on foreign policies.