News Translation: A Unique Form of Communication Production

Despite the fact that translation constitutes an absolutely essential component of news production process, and that most news writing requires language transfer to some degree, journalism studies has ignored the contribution of translation to the production of international news and the relevant processes to a great extent. This negligence, however, is not confined to media studies; translation studies too, has disregarded news translation for a long time and only recently started to give it the attention it deserves. In this paper, the aim is to establish an understanding of what news translation entails, what it denotes in translation and media studies, its principles and procedures, what factors affect it, and most importantly, what distinguishes it from other types of translation such as literary translation. The dissection of the above issues will hopefully be conductive to changing our perception of news translation and give us insight as to its significance in the production of global news. Another possible gain from the current study will be the contribution that can be made to how news translation courses are designed and thought in media and journalism schools.