Multilingual journalism, news translation and discourse: converging methods, converging theories

This study explores a methodological and theoretical framework suitable for the investigation of multilingual journalism, news translation and the discourses that these two meaning-making activities promote and transmit to global audiences. Departing from the consideration that journalism as well as translation are multi-layered objects and may conceal power dynamics and struggles within society, I suggest that such complexities can only be addressed and analysed if deconstructed and successively reconstructed through a combination of methods and theoretical perspectives. This study merges different methodological approaches, including Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics and comparative analysis in order to grasp the complexities and ramifications of different forms of journalism (i.e. broadcasting, online, written and a mix of the three) in different national, supranational and international contexts, (i.e. Italy, the UK, Europe, Australia and the Internet). This combination of methods and theories is termed "convergence" to indicate the convergence of approaches from a variety of fields of studies functional to the investigation of both multilingual news discourse and news translation, and ultimately echoing the increasingly pervasive phenomenon of media convergence. The "convergence" framework allows us to move past the traditional Source Text – Target Text opposition, thus favouring a more flexible and wider concept of translation, one that seems to be more fitting to the reality of language transfer processes in the news. In order to demonstrate the validity of the framework of convergence, this thesis presents a corpus of multilingual audio-visual news transcripts (AVNews Corpus), and four case studies, two employing the AVNews Corpus, one envisaging a more traditional comparative analysis, and finally one making use of a small parallel corpus. The four case studies presented in this thesis aim to showcase the validity of this framework, eventually calling for larger and more systematic studies about language transfer activities in the news.