This presentation will be part of the panel “Interdisciplinarity and interaction: moving forward with journalistic translation research in the 21st Century”, convened by Denise Filmer and Roberto Valdeon. The aim of this panel is to highlight journalistic translation research that delves into innovative and unchartered areas, such as sociological approaches to journalistic translation, ethnographic studies on news production, audience and reception studies or the use of machine translation in news translation.

The translation of political discourse on migration in Spain and Mexico. How does the migratory landscape impact translation strategies?

This paper studies the semantic shifts taking place during the translation process in translated news about migration, particularly the migration discourse coming from political domains, as political discourse shapes to a great extent the public opinion. For this purpose, I analyse the strategies used by the journalist/translator to transfer the political discourse about migration considering two Spanish-speaking countries, Spain and Mexico, which are characterised by having in recent times either immigrant or emigrant populations.

I will do so by applying critical discourse analysis from a translation studies perspective to a corpus of news published by eight online newspapers in Spain and Mexico during the last quarter of 2020 (coinciding with the presidential elections in the United States and the completion of Brexit with the ending of the transition period). The comparison between the two countries and the translation strategies used will allow to identify whether their different realities regarding the migrant process is an influential factor in the way they mediate in this migration discourse.

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Tell us about your new research project.

In my new project, I study the role played by the translator’s ideology in translated news about migration, particularly the discourse on migration coming from political spheres. For that, I analyse translated news and readers’ comments published in online newspapers (and their official Twitter accounts) which have clearly shown different political tendencies from two countries: Spain, as a European country of destination and transit for migrants, and Mexico, which acts as a country of transit for migration (mainly towards the US) but is also considered a nation with a large migrant population. My purpose is to understand how the translators intervene by using different translation strategies and what is the effect of this mediation on their audience.

Why is the topic of your project relevant?

Migration has become in the last decades one of the main social concerns and subject to policies around the World and, more particularly, in Europe. As a result of their impact on society, narratives on migration in the news have been widely studied. After all, people’s reactions are frequently influenced by the way in which migrant communities are depicted. However, the study of these narratives has been usually undertaken from a monolingual point of view, overlooking the fact that a large amount of information circulating in the European and international media about migration is actually based on translated news. Readers from different languages are considered to be reading ‘the same news’, extracted from the same source, but the information they receive is very often ‘filtered’ through translation and editing, which can lead to shifts in the discourse. Therefore, it is vital to understand how translation, which is the tool that makes information available beyond language restrictions, reshapes those narratives and what is their impact on the reader. 

How will the results impact the field of research and society?

In recent years the topic of this research has aroused the interest of governments and international institutions (e.g. Horizon 2020 scheme “Narratives on migration and its impact: past and present”), NGOs, and the research community. This has created very favourable conditions for providing new research which promotes the integration of migrant communities. The results of my study can support national and transnational institutions to formulate new policies or apply solutions which help tackle challenging issues related to migration, arising from the ideological mediation of texts, and provide objective information to citizens.

Moreover, I think the methods developed in this project can be applied at a regional level to examine the narratives on migration present in Estonian media, study their effects on the public opinion and promote the implementation of new protocols and policies which improve the inclusion of migrant communities. 

What is your 2-year perspective? How do you plan to organise the research in Tallinn? How do you see your possible contribution to the wider research and teaching activities of the School of Humanities?

In addition to disseminating the results of my research in academic publications and international forums and promoting collaborations with prominent R&D institutions, such as the Centre of Discourse Studies (Barcelona), my aim during these two years is to develop links with key organisations such as the Ethical Journalism Network and NGOs working on migration.

I will also be involved in the teaching and research activities of the curriculum in Translation Studies, including lectures and the coordination of seminars, and I hope to contribute to the linguistics department by collaborating with my colleagues here in promoting research on translation, a field which is exponentially growing at TLÜ. Ultimately, I would like to be an active part of that growth and strengthen the international competitiveness of the university in this pivotal field.

Link to full interview at Tallinn University’s Website [https://www.tlu.ee/en/ht/mediahub/blogs/interview-tanya-fernandez-escudero]

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The 10th EST22 Congress will take place between June 22, 2022, and June 25, 2022, in Oslo (University of Oslo and OsloMet), Norway.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven the importance of providing information reaching all members of multilingual societies, both in cities characterized by super-diversity and in less densely populated rural areas. However, the high rates of COVID-19 cases in migrant and minority populations show that many multilingual communication strategies have not been successful. This brings to the fore the topics of community translation, as well as the potential of translation policies and practices in achieving trust relationships and influencing changes in behaviour. 

A burgeoning interest in the connection between translation policy and theories provides insights that benefit Translation Studies, and the examination of the intersections among theories, policies and practices needs continued attention. Such analyses could advance Translation Studies by taking into account insights from super-diverse and multilingual settings where translation forms part of everyday life (Inghilleri 2017). At the same time, they could help develop better policies and practices for community and public service translation on local, regional, and national levels. 

This panel will include theoretical and methodological contributions and case studies addressing the intersections among the policies, theories, and practices of translation in multilingual settings, including the languages of migration and regional or minority languages. Some of the topics included will address:

• Guidelines for effective translation policies
• Production and itinerary of translated, interpreted and subtitled information
• Professional and non-professional translation practices
• Translation and inclusive urbanization
• Intersections between public-service translation and interpreting
• Theoretical, methodological, and ethical reflections on the creation and evolution of translation policies and practices
• Rethinking traditional binary oppositions, such as source/target, majority/minority, monolingual/multilingual, local/global, centre/periphery, urban/rural, trust/distrust, and agency/structure through the lens of translation policies
• Methodological and theoretical tools offered by adjacent disciplines (such as sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, political science, public policy, and legal studies).

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