News transediting, which involves both news translation and editing, is arguably the most common type of English-Korean news translation and yet remains one of the least studied fields of translation in South Korea. This thesis explores the nature of ...
News transediting, which involves both news translation and editing, is arguably the most common type of English-Korean news translation and yet remains one of the least studied fields of translation in South Korea. This thesis explores the nature of English-Korean news transediting with a particular focus on precisely how ideology and power relations influence the products and processes of the transediting of foreign news articles. Drawing upon the complementary frameworks of descriptive-explanatory translation studies (DETS) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), it proposes a model for the critical analysis of news transediting consisting of three dimensions of news discourse: text, institutional factors, and socio-political factors.
One of the key features of English-Korean news transediting is that it is performed not by professional translators, but by in-house journalists subject to a variety of institutional constraints. It is assumed that the most important among these constraints is an ideological one derived from the ownership structure of a news organization, and that the ideology of a news organization, particularly its power relations with the local government, are closely linked to both the choice of source texts (STs) to be translated and target texts (TTs) to be published.
Another important feature is that the majority of news transediting in South Korea is performed by Yonhap News Agency, the nation’s largest news agency, which is sponsored by the national government. This begs the question: What happens when Yonhap addresses the translation of foreign news articles that portray their sponsor in a negative light?
A great number of studies have demonstrated that news as a social (re)construction of reality is not a neutral product and that, as a commercial entity, a news organization will orient itself toward accommodating external forces such as owners, investors or advertisers. Along these lines, this thesis assumes that transedited news produced by journalists is not excepted from this phenomenon. Through in-depth interviews with news transeditors, analysis of corporate ownership structures and presidential approval ratings, as well as through case studies of text analysis incorporating such factors, this thesis sets out to explore the institutional and socio-political constraints that may influence the process of transediting. The data for analysis is comprised of 69 New York Times (NYT) articles related to the Korean government (ST) and 330 transedited news texts (TT) produced during the five-year term in office (2008-2012) of the previous South Korean government.
As the first step in the investigation of the relation between institutional ideologies and the transediting process, the subject news organizations (composed of offline newspaper companies, online newspaper companies and news agencies) were divided into two types based on an ownership analysis: government-related organizations (with the state either holding a controlling stake or exercising significant control over their operations) and private organization (lacking state-owned shares). The 330 TTs were similarly divided into two types based on the ownership type of the organization that produced the TT: TTgov (TTs produced by government-related organizations) and TTprv (TTs produced by private organizations). The NYT source articles were also categorized into ‘positive’, ‘negative’ and ‘neutral’ in terms of their portrayal of the South Korean government. Statistical tests were then conducted to determine whether the type of ownership is correlated with the type of NYT articles selected for translation. Considering the fact that news organizations often share news articles among themselves, the correlation between the type of TT (TTgov or TTprv) and of the NYT articles was also tested, in order to examine whether power relations with the government influence the ideological positioning of the news organization.
For the determination of the correlation between the institutional and socio-political factors in news transediting, statistical tests were conducted on the ownership-based type of an organization and TTs and presidential approval ratings.
Finally, four sets of STs and TTs were compared to examine how each TT positions itself ideologically in support of or in opposition to the government. In-depth analyses were performed to explore the manners in which diverse ideological structures and strategies are employed for strengthening positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation as conceptualized by van Dijk, depending upon the ideological stance of each organization.
This thesis concludes that ideology as an institutional constraint wields a significant influence on both the process and products of news transediting. It also identifies a tendency among liberal or progressive newspapers critical of the conservative government to emphasize the negative aspects and actions of the government by means of a variety of strategies of manipulation at the text level. In contrast, Yonhap is found to utilize a gatekeeping process to filter out sensitive STs, thereby preventing any perceived need for textual manipulation.