Tanya Escudero will present at the 10th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies (June 2022, Oslo) a paper entitled “The translation of migration discourse in political speech in Spain and Mexico. How does the migratory landscape impact translation strategies?”. This study is part of the project Ideology in translation. Political discourse on migration in the media, funded by the Estonian Research Council. 

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.