Are South African print newspaper narratives reframed for Internet news portals or not?

Abstract

This paper deals with the translation of newspaper texts from Afrikaans/English newspapers for Afrikaans/English Internet news portals. In this paper I discuss to what extent newspaper reports, selected for translation and subsequent publication on the Internet, undergo a reframing process and how these reports are edited, rewritten, reshaped and repackaged (transformed) for a new cultural context (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009). This study has a sociological and cultural perspective in that it deals with Baker's (2006) narrative frame model in detecting which narrative frames can be identified in the translation of these texts from South African newspapers for a more global readership. Baker sees framing as an active strategy that implies agency through which translators consciously participate in the construction of reality within a specific socio-cultural group. The way in which and the reasons why the news teams for the Internet news portals (re)direct or reframe the perspective of reality as constituted within South African print newspapers is the main research topic.

South Africa’s image as translated in Dutch-language media

“…It shows that national image presentation is not about truth, because all of these features are both true and not true. The journalistic presentation of the national and cultural image is about selection and deselection, and about framing through translation, as illustrated in Feinauer's (2016) contribution. "Afrikaans" can be presented as cute and related, or conversely as harsh when associating it with apartheid.…”

“…Baker's narrative frame model is also applied by Feinauer (2016), who investigates the translation of newspaper texts in South Africa, specifically from Afrikaans/English newspapers for Afrikaans/English internet news portals. Feinauer (2016: 194) detects: a definite reframing of information for the English and Afrikaans readerships, regardless of the genre of media platform used; in other words, frame ambiguity does occur between these two readerships.…”

A long walk to freedom: Charting a way for doing comparative translation studies in Africa

“…Ilse had a large hand in drafting the constitution and setting in place structures for ATSA. Except for the problems the continent faces, about which Ilse made some scholarly contributions of her own (Feinauer 2016, Feinauer and Lesch 2013, Fourie and Feinauer 2005, we were constantly musing about the future of translation studies in Africa or a research agenda for the continent. These musings found their way into a co-edited volume (Marais and Feinauer 2017) in which we explored the possibilities of translation studies in Africa moving beyond the postcolonial debate.…”