Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The language operations performed in news-agency work are of particular interest because they are predicated not only on the total invisibility of translation but also on anonymity and impersonality. A note originating in language A reaching an agency desk is transformed into a wire in language B in a way that fits it for reuse in the culture of language B without respect for any of the discursive, stylistic, or cultural features of the original. Agency work does not seek to respect the text or its origin, only the facts that lie behind the narrative. The resulting wire is a collective composition and also a reduction or expansion attributable to no one individual, only to the service provider. The wire text is then reformulated in the other languages in which that particular agency operates, again with additions and subtractions, all designed to achieve maximum clarity and usefulness in languages C through N, and made available worldwide so as to be rewritten a fourth time in any of the languages used by subscribers to the service. In its fourth redaction the story may be completely recontextualized in a news article attributed to a local journalist. That is to say, before you read a speech in English originally made in Tehran and in Farsi about an hour after it has been uttered, it may have been reformulated in Arabic by Al Jazeera’s man in Iran, then rewritten as an English wire by the AP bureau in Kuwait before being rephrased by a journalist in London; similarly, the news of an earthquake in Thailand may have been first reported in French by AFP’s Bangkok bureau and then issued on AFP’s English-language service from Paris before being rewritten into Farsi for the Iranian TV news a few minutes later. The structure of this elaborate network of skilled professionals producing international news ensures that the different language versions of a given note do not ever say exactly the same thing. They are held to communicate the same information, but the ways in which it is communicated are calibrated to well-founded assumptions about the political, social, religious, intellectual, moral, and other sensitivities that are prevalent in the receiving language and culture.

In these circumstances, how can you possibly know that the news is true? Well, you can’t. You just trust the news, which means that even if you don’t realize it and often claim the opposite in dinner party talk, you trust journalist-translators completely. How else could you believe that you know the first thing about what’s going on in the world?

Paradoxically, but not unreasonably, global news is a local product. This is not because of any linguistic obstacles to the circulation of information. Rather, it is because communication tasks in this field are subordinated to the real or perceived constraints imposed by the receiver. To get the nugget of new news from Ghent to Aix, contemporary postilions adjust, adapt, excise, or add almost anything to the source save that part of the reference deemed to be “news.” In a relatively short rhetorical leap, you could use this to reassert the radical position that all facts about the world are linguistic constructions and nothing else. But news agencies and the people who work in them are not interested in deconstruction. They pursue their trade with the firm conviction that the information they disseminate in different linguistic and rhetorical versions lies beyond language, in the domain of the real.

The way that translating is integrated into other kinds of language work in global news distribution is far from unique. In transnational law (at the ECJ, for instance), in diplomacy, and in the work of many international organizations, no precise boundary can be drawn between translation, on the one hand, and drafting, editing, correcting, reformulating, and adapting a text, whether written in the same or in some other tongue, on the other. In these many important domains, translating is just one element in the progressive refinement and wider circulation of texts.