Invited speaker at the 2023 Integration Foundation Conference (Tallinn, Estonia)

The Integration Conference “From Security to Solidarity: Challenges of Integration in the Times of Crisis” took place in November 2023. The event proposed an in-depth exploration of integration-themed topics, providing a platform for discussions and best practices exchange, drawing from narratives both within and outside Europe. The Integration Conference is designed for experts in the field of integration, policymakers, scholars, but also enthusiasts, practitioners, representatives from the third sector and the general public.

The conference opened with an overview of the results of the project “Improving Communication with Migrants for Crisis Preparedness” led by Tanya Escudero, that served as a transition to move from the covid crisis to the current war crisis.

More about the Integration Conference and agenda here.

Abstract: The project “Improving Communication with Migrants for Crisis Preparedness: Lessons Learned From COVID-19”, which was carried out by researchers in Estonia, Finland and Latvia, sought to map obstacles in communicating with communities with low command of the official language and identify good practices that could be implemented in future emergencies.
The results show that, in addition to the underlying distrust of state institutions among the population, there have been several obstacles that have further aggravated the situation and perhaps put society at risk, including insufficient information available in non-official languages or the slow provision of this information; conflicting or confusing messages from official sources; the viral spread of misinformation in different spheres, such as social media; a lack of cooperation between governments and other stakeholders; and monolithic strategies that are not adapted to the needs and concerns of specific communities, such as the approach adopted during the vaccination campaign.

The resulting reports are available for open access here.

Migration Discourse in Translated News at EST22Oslo

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.