In the 1970s, Italy’s national identity was transformed and re-negotiated consequent to a number of tragic events and radical reforms. The country’s image and self-image were constantly revisited in domestic and foreign news features. To this day, the best-known verbal icon of that period remains the phrase “strategia della tensione” (strategy of tension), from the headline of an article in the British press. This highlights a tendency of the Italian newspapers to “look up” to the British newspapers. The aim of this chapter is to investigate how this tendency to prioritize British images of the Italian scenario, turning them into tropes, influenced the construction of Italy’s image between 1969 and 1980. A parallel corpus of articles from The Times and La Stampa is explored through a methodological framework combining diachronic News Translation Studies and the strategies of Imagology. Electronic querying and manual inspection of the corpus revealed cases of textual migration, consisting of textual segments in La Stampa mirroring excerpts from The Times. These migrated texts were identified and labelled according to the translation strategy employed – selective appropriations, permutations, omissions, and additions (Valdeón 2008) – in order to investigate potential agendas, gatekeeping or self-censorship practices. However, rather than display an agenda, this analysis seems to reveal a clash between the British image and Italy’s self-image in the troubled 1970s, the latter being constructed through heavy domestication of the British articles. Translation choices indeed reveal patterns of mitigation of criticism, as well as foregrounding of positive comments, which require a discourse-based approach in order to be fully understood. The strategies of Imagology – notably those applied to Translation Studies in recent work by van Doorslaer (2010) – prove particularly useful in detailing these findings, through close observation of the constructed images of the country.

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The inaugural speech of the new President of The United States is one of those rare cases in news translation in which it is possible to identify a Source Text (ST) and compare it to several Target Texts (TTs). This paper focuses on what was reported in eight Italian national daily newspapers concerning the inaugural address of Donald Trump in 2017 on the day following his inaugural address. It provides an overview of the different choices and levels of translation visibility that were observed in the selected newspapers, observing full translations, paratexts and migrated segments embedded in articles describing the inaugural. Through a focus on the ST-TT comparison-employing Selective Appropriation (Valdeón, 2008) and Munday's Evaluation paradigm (2012)-this investigation shows how the comparative analysis of translations can also be employed to enrich the textual analysis of the inaugural itself. Ideological translation choices are explored, focusing in particular on a case of omission in the right-wing Libero-which openly appreciated the election of Trump-and a case of addition in the communist Il Manifesto-which openly deplored Trump.

Recognizing that disciplinary confines often represent serious hurdles for translation scholars, this article offers a reflection on the boundaries of the subarea of news translation within the discipline of translation studies, focusing on its links with research that employs corpus-aided techniques, in particular critical discourse analysis and corpusassisted discourse studies. Reviewing a number of relevant studies and research projects that use different types of corpora, the discussion explores some of the main difficulties inherent in analysing translated news texts, which are often heavily mediated and edited in various ways; the ensuing key challenges associated with conducting journalistic translation research are examined. The article calls for mutual recognition and cross-fertilization between disciplines that investigate translated news from different, usually complementary, perspectives. In particular, the study of ideology and bias in translated news benefits from composite approaches and multi-faceted research projects that combine methods drawn from different areas: we argue that open and inclusive approaches are vital to uncover new and important insights into news translation.

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