Translational and discursive processes in multilingual news production by global news agencies: representations about Bolivia

Global news agencies are major sources of international news that transcend geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. Journalism and translation coexist in multilingual newsrooms; however, translation often goes unacknowledged within the plurality of authorship that characterizes this journalistic setting. Such a paradox motivates the examination of the role of translation and of news translators to define and describe translation as an enabler of global flows of information. This thesis deals with the multilingual news production of global news agencies and concentrates on the journalistic representation of the South American country of Bolivia. This work brings to the table datasets informed by news coverage initially conceived in Spanish, that carry traces of indigenous languages and is produced at the local desks of global news agencies. The examination of these datasets continues through its journey to reach the global audience in French and English versions. This thesis also endeavours to offer a systematic account of the multilingual news coverage representing a country at a specific period of social import. The analytical core of this work is the multilingual versions of news dispatches published in 2020 by Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Agencia EFE, and Reuters, in Spanish, French, and English, which are contrasted and examined from a translational perspective. This translational approach is accompanied by the consideration of the discursive and contextual dimensions of news production, by employing a corpora and ethnographic work. These methodological approaches constitute an analytical framework that is applied to three case-studies to examine cultural and political news coverage, topics that are not always clearly disentangled from one another. The linguistic evidence found in this work suggests that close and distant renditions occur in translated news. This thesis offers methodological reflections on the combination of translational, discursive, and ethnographic approaches and its potential to furthering interdisciplinary research.