Towards alternatives to mechanistic models of translation in contemporary journalism

Abstract

The 'domestication norm' has been frequently identified as a feature of news translation. However, a paradigm shift in translational behaviour in news production might be underway, coinciding in time with the democratisation of free machine translation services. An analysis of a corpus of science-journalism articles published in a 'hyperlocal' Spanish medium, including reactions from readers, will confirm this hypothesis. Exploring the effects and implications of the adoption of (scarcely) postedited machine translation procedures in the production of digital news will offer grounds for delineating alternatives to the 'mechanistic' translation practices that are on the rise in contemporary journalism. Domestication as the assumed translation norm in scholarly research on news productionResearch on journalistic translation has frequently identified the 'domestication norm' as a common feature of translation in the production of news, i.e. the participation of translation in the dissemination of fluent, seemingly transparent texts and news content which are adapted to the conventions of the receiving context and attuned to the expectations of the target audience