Re-writing and Translation in the News Production Process: News Agency Wires

This Chapter, grounded in the production-oriented news research agenda, analyses a text genre that plays a crucial role in the news production process, i.e. the news agency wire, and looks comparatively at a corpus of Reuters wires in English dealing with the ongoing Middle East crisis and international terrorism, a parallel corpus comprising their Italian versions, and also the headlines of news articles based on them. It aims to identify the changes that the original text undergoes during the news production process, also considering that when it also includes translation the texts involved are even more liable to alteration and manipulation. From the analysis, carried out from different perspectives (quantitative and qualitative, macro and micro), one main trend has emerged: when they rewrite wires, translators–far from following the ST closely–modify the distribution of information within each text, adapting it to Italian journalistic conventions. This suggests that the translation/re-writing process is aimed at anticipating the language of the news story, producing texts that are meant to be “re-used” faithfully, even verbatim, in the final news article; in other words, the Italian version seems organised so as to preformulate the wording of the final news story.